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:

Secret Orders

Secret Orders, by H. Paul Jeffers
October, 1989  Zebra Books

The awesome cover has you expecting a horror novel, but Secret Orders is in fact a conspiracy thriller, one about a former Nazi who now lives in New York City and the group of people who try to bring him and his colleagues to justice. Another misleading thing about the novel is that the back cover and first hundred pages make you assume it takes place in 1989, the year of publication; only after page 100 does author Jeffers bother informing us that all of this occurs in 1967!

Secret Orders is also a novel in search of a protagonist. Is it young Daniel Ben Avram, who opens the tale, a young Israeli secret agent who is sent to the US to discern if wealthy and famous arts patron Peter Helder is in fact former SS concentration camp sadist August Grenier? Or is it David Hargreave, a veteran New York homicide detective who takes over the middle portion of the novel? Or finally is it Alexander Somerfield, a portly former reporter and CIA agent who now makes his living writing mysteries? (The back cover pronounces Somerfield as the hero of the tale; humorously, he doesn’t even appear until about 200 pages in.)

Another issue with the novel is that it starts off so great and then settles in to become for the most part a tepid and bland crawl. But that opening is something else. Young Daniel is summoned from Tel Aviv into Jerusalem, where he meets with his handler Ammon and a famous general, who give Daniel his mission – going undercover to New York City and finding Helder. Here we have several chapters made up of backstory provided by various witnesses, each who tells us who Helder was in the war and how he got his sordid kicks.

Before the war Helder was also into the occult, and after joining both the Thule and Vril societies he became obsessed with harnessing the “vril” power from other humans. So we learn that, while he ran the concentration camp, Helder would have young men stripped down and shackled up, hook up electrodes to their testicles, force them to masturbate, and then switch on the electricity when they orgasmed! Oh, and while doing this he’d wear a leather face mask with zipper slits for the mouth.

And it keeps on going…given that Helder’s gay and Daniel’s posing undercover, this means that Daniel has to move through the NYC underworld of gay bars. Yes, there’s even a scene where he buys leather chaps and etc to complete the look, in the hopes of sauntering into one of the clubs and catching Helder’s eye! Of course it works, and soon Daniel is hanging around with Helder, going with him to fancy restaurants and the occasional leather club; a recurring joke is Daniel’s certainity that Helder will soon make the expected pass at him, but Daniel’s not certain how he’ll react.

Just when it’s all getting nice and lurid the narrative jumps over to David Hargreave, an old cop who is close to retirement. All the lurid stuff evaporates from the novel, along with Daniel himself, who just disappears – it isn’t until nearly the very end that we discover what happened to him. Meanwhile Helder is dead, hanging nude from the secret dungeon beneath his Manhattan art gallery, a leather zipper mask covering his face.

This sequence is a bit trying. Hargreave is a fine character, but after the forward momentum of the opening several chapters with Daniel, this slower-paced police procedural stuff just brings the novel to a dead halt. Even more damning, Jeffers repeats a ton of information here, with Hargreave methodically discovering stuff about Helder that we readers already know.

There’s even an extended bit where Ammon, who has come to NYC looking for Daniel, finds Daniel’s journal, and Jeffers writes out most of the entries in the book – taken word-for-word from earlier scenes with Daniel! My assumption is that this is yet another indication of Zebra’s bizarre policy of making their paperback originals nice and long; Secret Orders could stand to loose a hundred or so pages, easy.

Another character here who gets a bunch of narrative time is a grubby reporter, who mostly serves as the impetus for getting Alexander Somerfield into the tale. Castle style, Somerfield is wealthy from his writing but still enjoys digging up real-life crimes and whatnot. A former spy, Somerfield was more along the lines of a courier, never getting into any sort of action or trouble. In fact what most draws him to the Helder case is the potential for new book material.

I bring up Castle for a reason. While it’s an okay show, I’ve noticed that, for a world-famous author, Castle never friggin writes. For that matter, the son of a bitch never even mentions books! In fact the whole show presents a misguided view of the author’s life – don’t be interested in books and seldom if ever write, and you too can be a wealthy novelist. But anyway, as it so happens Secret Orders proves how boring Castle would be if its titular character was more engaged in the act of writing and the world of books – because, my friends, Alexander Somerfield is a snoozer of a protagonist.

For one, the dude is almost a clone of Hargreave (who himself was a well-read sort prone to dropping literary allusions and esoteric quotations), but secondly, all Somerfield talks about or thinks about are books. I mean, it’s cool in a way, I myself am a book lover and all, but honestly if I was investigating a case where a former Nazi was found hanging nude with a leather mask on his face, I really don’t think I’d be walking around quoting Fitzgerald or Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

What I mean to say is, Alexander Somerfield is a boring protagonist for such a compelling plot – at least, a plot that starts off so compelling. The pulp material calls for a pulp protagonist, and Daniel fit the bill nicely. Like me you will no doubt miss him when he disappears from the text. He is much better than the overfed, Sherlock Holmes-obsessed bore who eventually takes his place. The Vril Society stuff, Helder’s occult background and interests, etc, all of it goes away and instead we get long scenes of Somerfield standing around and thinking about this or that book.

Which brings me back to the plot – it eventually develops that Helder was a member of the Atlantis Club, a global membership of the uber-wealthy which sort of seems based on the Freemasons. The back cover has you expecting a story about an underground society of former Nazis who have infiltrated the US government (ie Operation Paperclip, or even the COMCON storyline), but this is not to be – all such promise is lost as the novel settles into repetition and blandness. It becomes a simple murder mystery instead of a conspiracy thriller, as Somerfield tries to figure out who killed Helder.

Maybe Jeffers was going for something here – it’s hard not to notice how the youthful and brash Daniel is replaced by not one but two protagonists who are over-the-hill and heavyset, older men who are veteran thinkers and more prone to using their heads to solve a case. And really, bringing such “real-life” type protagonists to a pulpy spy tale is fine…as long as you don’t open the tale with talk about the Thule and Vril Societies and a dude in a leather mask who fries young men while they masturbate…I mean, that just sets the reader up for a whole different sort of novel than something “real-life.”

The Ultimate Solution

The Ultimate Solution, by Eric Norden
May, 1973  Warner Paperback Library

This slim paperback original imagines an alternate 1973 in which the Germans won WWII and now the entire Western world is under the control of the Nazis (the “Empire of Japan” rules the East). And yet for all of that The Ultimate Solution is really just a police procedural, narrated by New York cop Lt. Bill Hadler as he is tasked to hunt down an actual Jew – the only one left if the world.

Norden throws us right into this bizarre world and doles out background detail at his leisure; it isn’t until the very end that we even find out how exactly the Germans won. (Basically, the US stayed out of the confrontation until it was “too late,” by which point the Germans had the atom bomb, which they used on Europe and then a few US cities…including Pittsburgh! Why would anyone want to bomb Pittsburgh??) Instead Norden places us square in this alternate 1973, with Hadler’s narrative cynically detailing the strange Nazi-run world as if there’s nothing unusual about it…which obviously there isn’t, so far as he’s concerned.

What most impressed me is how economically Norden tells his tale, not to mention bringing to life a whole alternate world – the novel runs a brisk 142 pages. Despite the short length we get a fast-moving plot, good characterization and dialog, and some well-rendered action scenes. The novel’s actually a great teacher on how to keep a story moving while still doling out a modicum of background and information; never once does Norden resort to exposition or info-dumping. As I say, he treats the tale as if it’s just a regular cop story; while Hadler might have a few issues with the society in which he lives, never once does he question anything about it. He’s just a cop doing a dirty job.

The job’s actually more than dirty – Hadler gradually realizes that it’s a no-win situation. Called in by the Gestapo (aka the “Feds” – the FBI of Hadler’s world), Hadler reconnects with a Gestapo colleague he worked with in the past. A German VIP is on his way to New York, and he’s contacted the Gestapo to find a good New York cop to handle a highly secretive and important case. The VIP is Von Kleef, an old man who started with Hitler in the earliest days, and thus is now at the very pinnacle of the Nazi world; Norden presents a very interesting picture of how Hitler’s henchmen would’ve profited had the Nazis won the war.

Von Kleef personally oversaw the extermination of all the Jews, and takes it very personally that one of them might still be alive. It turns out that a few weeks ago someone robbed an antiques store in New York, the culprit being an old man who freaked out at the display of Jewish skulls on display – “nothing pieces,” we’re told, so ubiquitous as to have no value, usually used as ash trays. The man left behind a telltale piece that Von Kleef is certain could only belong to a Jew – a mezzuzah. Von Kleef wants this old man tracked down, and he wants to keep it secret; Germany is closing in on war with the Japanese Empire, and the “ContraAxists” who are pro-war don’t want it leaked out that a Jew might’ve escaped the Nazi “final solution,” as it could be used as propaganda against them.

Hadler isn’t thrilled to take the case, but he has no choice. He works it with Ed Kohler, the aforementioned Gestapo agent Hadler worked with in the past. Together they scour this bizarre and sadistic NYC as they track down clues. Here Norden doles out more of his background detail, and we see that this alternate world is incredibly grim. Blacks have their tongues excised at birth and are raised to become “bucks” that fight like ancient gladiators, millions of people watching and betting as they fight to the death. Slavs too have their tongues removed and are now imported as either sex-slaves or as the chained victims of torture clubs. There are even whorehouses staffed solely by children.

Norden gives more background on this “ultimate solution” as Hadler and Kohler visit a concentration camp outside New York, where the thorough destruction of all American Jews was carried out years before. The pointedly-ironic element here is the camp commandant, who comes off like your average all-American, square-jawed and buzzcutted military type, who happily regales Hadler and Kohler with tales of the major Jewish purge he helmed a few decades ago. We also learn that this concentration camp is now an amusement park, and also that “these kids today” are disinterested in the history of the camp and could care less.

The book works mostly as a police procedural/mystery, but Norden provides a few action scenes. In one of them we learn that Hadler packs a Schmeisser, which apparently is police standard in this alternate world; he uses it on a homeless man who attacks him with karate. But the bum is wearing a Mission: Impossible-style mask, beneath which Hadler discovers the face of a Japanese man. Here Norden works in some conspiracy angles as it turns out the Japanese also know about “the Jew” and thus are trying to not only capture him for their own propaganda purposes, but are also trying to take out anyone else who is searching for him.

There’s very little about the novel that is sci-fi, until toward the very end, when Norden introduces the idea that the Jew is actually from a different world: ours. This element isn’t fully elaborated, but when we finally meet the Jew he claims that he “died” on our world and woke up to find himself in this alternate reality. One of the characters, who happens to be sheltering the Jew, believes that the man has been sent here as a harbinger of a better world, that the universe sometimes makes “mistakes” and attempts to rectify them, this Nazi-ruled world being one of those mistakes. (Sometimes I feel the same way about our own world, though.) This sci-fi stuff appears to be leading to a sci-fi ending, but Norden retain his tone and delivers a climax more grounded in the grim world he has created.

My main problem with The Ultimate Solution is that this alternate world is just too evil, almost comic bookishly so. I had a hard time believing that the entirety of the world could so easily give over to such brutal and sadistic leanings, especially within just one generation. (But then, a generation ago who would guess that within 30 or so years people would avidly take photos of their meals and other mundane aspects of their life and then upload them to the internet for others to comment on and “like?”) Still though, live torture acts on tongueless Slavs? Whorehouses comprised solely of children? Even pet hamsters which are specifically sold so as to be tortured and crucified? It’s just all too much.

And some of the stuff doesn’t even fit into what I know about Nazism…for example, Hadler states that homosexuality is preferred and heterosex is “frowned upon” by the elite, with male/female relationships only condoned for breeding purposes. But weren’t the SA drummed out of the Nazi party over allegations that they were made up of gays? Sure it was just slander, but the very fact that it was used as slander would indicate that homosexuality was not openly viewed as acceptable…and that is the issue here. All “evil” things are openly acknowledged by the ruling Nazis in Norden’s world, whereas to me it would seem more realistic that they would retain their “clean cut” image and do all the dirty stuff behind the scenes.

I read somewhere that Eric Norden was the pseudonym of Eric Pelletier, and that he was born in 1899 and died in 1979. I'm not sure if this is accurate. I have the June 1969 issue of Playboy, which features an article by Norden ("The Paramilitary Right"); the issue has a photo of him on the contributors page, and Norden looks like a young man in it, not a 70 year-old. (The brief author bio states that Norden is a "free-lance writer who is currently in London researching a novel.") After a handful of short stories in the early ‘70s he published The Ultimate Solution in 1973; it was his only novel. In 1978 he published Starsongs and Unicorns: Journeys Through Time and Space, a Manor paperback original which collected his sci-fi short story work. I've read a few of the stories and they're all good, if not as memorable as this novel. After this it appears Norden dropped off the map, though of course it's possible he passed away in 1979.

Also I need to mention that this novel is exceedingly rare, not to mention overpriced. But guess what, I got my copy via InterLibrary Loan. And the unknown librarian at the lending library (The University of Texas) is to be commended – the person actually bound a hardcover overtop the original book, thus perfectly preserving the front and back covers of the old paperback.

Men's Mag Roundup: U-Boat Hit Men, Cycle Breakouts, and Yank Saboteurs

Amid all of the sex articles and advertisements there’s actually a pretty good pulp WWII tale in the June 1975 issue of Male: “The US Navy’s U-Boat Hit Men,” by Charles Kennon, a True Book Bonus that, while not as long as earlier such features, is still long enough to provide an enjoyable tale. It’s late summer 1942 and Navy Intelligence officer Tom Sapinksy’s mission is personal; earlier in the year his younger brother was killed when his ship was attacked by a merciless U-Boat that even gunned down the American sailors as they clung to lifeboats. Now Sapinsky is putting together a team of killers to even the score.

In pure Dirty Dozen style Sapinsky deliberately chooses the nastiest dudes he can find. Chief among them is Rick Jackman, a Chicago button man who Sapinsky had many dealings with back when Sapinsky was a cop in the pre-War years. He also gets a demolitions guy, a marskman, and finally rounds out the six-person team with Gretta Wulff, a Czech lady who has lived in Germany and will use her beauty per men’s mag tradition to ensnare horny Nazis. Unfortunately the brevity of the piece hampers Kennon from filling out the majority of these characters; it would be nice if there really was a true “U-Boat Hit Men” book.

Sapinksy considers the team to be “hit men,” and they really live up to the mantle; sneaking into Hamburg they go about murdering several U-Boat commanders who are all stationed here. The hits are carried out Mafia style, with captains getting gunned down as they leave whorehouses or being blown up by car bombs. There’s even a Godfather riff where Jackman walks right up to a captain as the guy’s having dinner in a restaurant and blows the dude’s head off, then calmly turns around and walks out.

Earl Norem’s cover painting actually illustrates a scene in the story, as the team converges on their last mission, ambushing a ribald party that goes down inside of a docked U-Boat. Kennon vaguely describes the lurid activities as drunk sailors cavort with whores while three of Sapinksy’s men get in frogmen gear and plant explosives on the U-Boat. This leads to a brief action scene with the team blowing away the emerging Nazis. Even the finale of The Dirty Dozen is followed, with the team suffering major losses – even moreso than in EM Nathanson’s novel.

The rest of the material is the expected “sex research” stuff, but there’s also “The Texan who Terrorizes the Sicilian Mafia,” a Joe Dennis tale about Vincent D’allesandro, a Texan on honeymoon in Sicily where his wife is gunned down when the couple stumbles upon a mob war. D’allesandro trains himself in the use of the lupara, aka the mini-shotguns favored in this part of the world, and hooking up with a pretty local gal he wages war on the Sicilian mob responsible for his wife’s death – in between bouts of sex, of course, D’allesandro quickly learning to move on after the loss of his wife.

The extra-length story in the April 1971 Male is even better: “Cycle Breakout Across Nazi Germany,” by Charles Warner, a fast-paced tale in which an OSS agent named Arnold Wassserman ventures into Germany to find a woman that has valuable intel and then deliver her into Allied hands. However the woman, Utta Wulf, happens to be a Nazi officer, and Wasserman is uncertain if he can trust her. The “cycle” is a BMW motorcycle with side car that will serve as their sole means of escape to Switzerland.

Warner opens the story with Wasserman and Utta already sleeping together – again, per men’s mag tradition, the gal freely gives herself to the guy mere moments after they meet – and Wasserman still wondering if he can trust her. She’s a high-ranking member of the SS and has the double lightning bolt sigil tattooed beneath her right arm, “marking her now and forever as a member of the Nazi party.” Wasserman’s uncertainty is compounded when a savage pounding comes at the door of Utta’s apartment, and she cracks it open, sticks out her Luger, and blows away whoever’s standing out there, sight unseen!

Of course it turns out they were Nazis – “Only the SS knocks on doors like that,” explains Utta. Wasserman is here because Utta’s uncle was a Nazi scientist who worked with the jelly needed to create bombs; sickened by the war he turned on the Nazis, contacting the Allies and offering to let them know where the secret jelly-producing plants in Germany were in exchange for exfiltration from Nazi Germany. He was killed before this could happen, but Utta has the info, which she has memorized and won’t give away until she’s safely out of Germany – she too claims to now be against the Nazi party.

The titular cycle plays only a small part, Wasserman driving as Utta sits in the side car. There’s only one action scene in it, as they break through a Nazi gatepost, Utta mowing down the young soldiers with her “special SS” submachine gun. Wasserman himself doesn’t do much, and Warner plays up more on the characterization, with Wasserman given more depth than the average men’s adventure protagonist. Haunted by past missions, ravaged both physically and mentally, he just wants to get this final mission done so he can escape to a desk job. Given this, he makes numerous mistakes throughout the story and is fraught with self-doubt.

Utta handles the brunt of the action, and also provides convenient shelter for when they head into a massive snowstorm; Utta’s conman cousin, who lives near the German/Switzerland border. But the dude tries to turn in Utta for the reward, and in the quick fight Wasserman’s forearm is mostly blown off and Utta wastes her cousin. Wasserman wakes up to find himself safely in Switzerland, where Utta has brought him; after giving the Allies the intel she stays there, and we learn in a postscript that she was actually a deep-cover Russian spy.

On an adventure fiction tip there’s “We Survived Africa’s Island of Killer Baboons” by Ken Dawson, a first-person narrative about an adventurer who is hired to fly an anthropologist and his sexy daughter onto infamous “Ape island” in Mozambique. This is a fairly long story and of course plays up to the expected tropes, with our hero and the daughter, Ilse, getting cudly as they make their way to the island, culminating in lots of violence as the legendary man-sized baboons attack them.

There’s also “The Nude Pays Off,” a “special fiction” piece by Pat Dowell; another first-person narrative, this one about a bartender who is approached by one of his many female patrons/conquests to help her in a robbery. Otherwise we have the usual assortment of sex research pieces, including yet another one that’s given over to (fake) transcripts as a reporter checks out the porno shops in Denmark.

It isn’t just a “True Book Bonus” in the September 1970 For Men Only; no, it’s also “soon to be a major motion picture!” But this is a double lie, as there was never a book or a movie made out of Grant Freeling’s “They Cripped Hitler’s D-Day Defenses.” A shame too, because while it isn’t as good as the “Sex Circus Stalag” story I recently read by Freeling, it’s still a lot of fun, if perhaps focusing more on intrigue and suspense than lurid thrills.

It’s May 1944 and Captain Jack Maitland, a “yank saboteur” with the OSS, once again ventures into Occupied France to work with a branch of the French Resistance he’s fought beside many times before; the OSS believes that one of the three leaders of this branch is actually a Nazi informant. Maitland stays on a farm, put there by Coutard, one of the Resistance leaders and thus one of the suspects. Also staying in this farm is Angelique Dubois, a Resistance member who is hiding out after an attack on her own branch – and you wouldn’t be surprised to know that she has the mandatory brick shithouse bod and the looks of a supermodel.

Coutard however has a definite interest in Angelique, so Maitland plays it cool, focusing instead on his mission. He sets it up so that each man must go on a perilous assassination mission, Maitland going along, the idea being that, if one of them is a traitor, he will take advantage of it being just Maitland and himself and thus do away with Maitland if the opportunity arises. However none of the men prove to be traitors as they kill the Germans. The hits are a bit novel, for example one of the Germans being taken out by an elaborate bombing scheme as he rides along in his staff car.

Angelique eventually demands that Maitland have sex with her (one thing I’ve learned from these men’s mags is that curvy and busty European women just friggin’ loved American men in WWII). But Coutard finds out and goes into a rage, so that Maitland figures he must be the traitor. But it’s an obvious red herring, and while Coutard drops out of sight Maitland plans a Force 10 From Navarone style blowing of a bridge. But then Coutard appears, proving who the real traitor is (one of the other leaders, who faked the car bombing murder of one of the Germans), and we learn in postscript that Coutard eventually got Angelique to marry him, once Maitland was back home.

“How Call Girls Work as Airline Stewardesses” seems tailor-made for Curt Purcell over at The Groovy Age of Horror. It’s by Linda Ann Sanders “as told to” Barry Jamieson and is the first-person narrative of a hooker who inadvertently became a groovy stewardess, taking advantage of the fact that the job put her in touch with wealthy men, men she eventually turned into her johns. Eventually she puts together a group of stewardesses who all do the same thing, but for the most part Jamieson’s story is more of a background piece on how Linda Ann got started on her “cathouse on wings” scheme.

“Infiltrate, Destroy, Saigon’s Black Market Money Changers” by Don Honig immediately shows its fiction roots: it’s credited to Honig but it’s in first person, and the narrator says his name is “Doug” and that he’s a spy in Saigon! The story though is tepid, our hero going undercover to find out where all the disappearing war funds are going in Saigon; this leads him to a group of black marketers, culminating in a shootout. More faux-“true” stuff is found in “Held Hostage in the Grand Canyon by Three Sex-Starved Convicts,” a survival epic by Larry Wilson “as told to” Sean Sterling, in which the narrator and his wife are kidnapped by the titular convicts, who rape the narrator’s wife before the narrator is able to turn the tables on them.

The “special fiction” tale is “Doctor In The Nude” by Alex Austin, a hilariously pre-PC story about a ladies man who is in the hospital for minor surgery and is shocked to not only discover his doctor is a woman, but also that she’s smokin’ hot. He fantasizes about screwing her, and eventually finds himself having vivid dreams of her coming to his bed each night. Turns out these aren’t dreams – no, the good doctor is merely drugging the guy and then slipping into his bed after the meds kick in, screwing his brains out!

Finally there’s “I Smashed a Killer Baboon Pack,” another faux-“true” deal, this one by Pat Hollister “as told to” Tom Christopher; similar to the baboons story above, this one’s about an American engineer building a hospital in Africa where roving baboon packs are sowing hell, so he heads a party into the bush to blow the little bastards away. Man, the guys at Diamond magazines must've really had something against baboons.

Men's Mag Roundup: More Nazi She-Devils

Since the last batch of Nazi She-Devil stories I read were mostly subpar, I thought I’d take a look at similar stories published by the Diamond line of men’s adventure magazines. Unfortunately it appears there wasn’t too many of them – while the Diamond line offered very pulpy tales, it looks like they never really exploited the Nazi She-Devil subgenre. A shame, really, as the stories in these mags are all better than those I reviewed in the previous batch.

However the first story, from the November 1960 Male, is misadvertising of the worst sort. The “true book bonus” is the promisingly-titled “Prisoner in Fraulein Anna’s Private Compound,” by Eugene Heimler, and the title has you expecting one lurid read. And check out the splashpage art by Charles Copeland, which makes the story come off like the ultimate piece of Nazi She-Devil pulp:

And yet…there is no such scene in this story. There’s no “private compound.” There’s no “man-hungry Nazi prison mistress.” There isn’t even a “Fraulein Anna!!” In short, nothing in this illustration or its captions takes place in the actual story – which in fact is an excerpt from Heimler’s book The Night of Mist (later reprinted as Concentration Camp), a nonfiction book about Heimer’s life in a concentration camp. It’s actually pretty despicable that editor Bruce J. Friedman would put such a sensational, lurid splash illustration on what is a true account of the unimaginable horrors of a Nazi camp…not to mention that the rest of the story is graced with grisly photos of corpses in the camps.

Anyway Heimler’s account is as expected harrowing and depressing and comes off very strange placed here in a pulp magazine filled with pulp fiction. “Fraulein Anna” in reality turns out to be a young gypsy girl named Anna who is the daughter of one of Heimler’s fellow prisoners in the camp, and the story details the horrors of the camp and how ordinary people were faced with the ultimate evil. It’s hard to realize the magnitude of what the Nazis did, and I feel that publishing this excerpt in a pulp mag with misleading captions and art cheapens it. I wonder how editor Friedman could stoop to such a thing.

Luckily the other stories are the more-expected pulpy and fun tales. “The G.I. Who Holed Up with a Cossack Brigade” by Peter Lee takes place in 1918 during the Russian civil war and is about an American, Corporal Leon Vonsky, who is sent to help a battalion of Cossacks fight the Reds. It turns out this is an all-female battalion, the balshiye svitski, aka the “big-bosom brigade,” made up of sturdy Cossack women. The story follows the expected path with the chief of the women, Dayra, making advances on Vonsky as soon as he arrives, with other women following suit as he stays with them for a protracted time. It builds up to a climactic assault on Communist forces, but overall the story was a bit underwhelming.

“There’s A Psycho at the Controls of the Lazy Lil” by Glenn Infield is an unintentionally funny piece about a bomber pilot who goes nuts after a crash landing during heavy fighting in WWII; he breaks out of his asylum and steals a B-17, heading for Germany. His brother, also a bomber pilot, goes after him, trying to call him back. Goofy stuff, with the sane brother calling to the insane one over the radio, and the insane one has no idea where he is or what’s going on as he takes on German planes.

Another long story is “TheYank Who Flew 20 Partygirls Out Of Red-Held Soochow,” by Martin Fass – this one is about Joe Haskell, a pilot who after the Korean War stuck around in Asia to fly his own plane service. His old airplane is a waste, though, and he’s offered a job by Shanghai crook Pei, who tells Haskell that if he can get into China and take back Pei’s old plane, returning with it and Pei’s brother to Shanghai, then the plane will be Haskell’s. But it turns out that the “brother” is really infamous Red Chinese VIP General Soo, and in addition there are twenty convent girls: pretty young things who, in exchange for being smuggled out of China, will work for a year in one of Pei’s brothels.

The story instead becomes a survival epic, as the plane crashes due to enemy fire and Haskell takes it in on an idyllic, deserted island – one complete with streams and beaches and basically anything a person could want. They build huts to live in and in between warding off the increasingly-insane Soo, Haskell develops a thing for one of the girls, Dora. But eventually the other girls get sick of Dora hogging all of the lovin’, so Dora asks if Haskell wouldn’t mind spending time with a different girl every night? Finally Haskell’s able to get the plane off the island, but the girls want to stay, and we’re told that now each year Haskell finds the time to “leave civilization” and spend a few months with them on their island!

“The Day Big Murphy Became God of Tiera Del Fuego” by Martin Sol is another goofy piece, this one about a redheaded Bostonian in the 1920s who shipwrecks off an island where his red hair makes the natives think he is a representative of their god. The expected stuff, with Murphy getting in some quality time with the native beauties who worship him, while meanwhile the old chief begins to hate Murphy and plots to feed him to “the fire god,” aka the island’s live volcano.

The December 1960 Male is much better. And the Nazi She-Devil story here is the best one I’ve yet read: “Baron Klugge’s Strange Fraulein Cult,” by Gregory Patrick. Whoever Patrick is, he has a great sense of humor and delivers a long story that doesn’t take itself seriously in the least. It’s 1945, four months after the German surrender, and Corporal Peter Decker is picked up by an attractive fraulein in Stuttgart. The lady, Helga, tells Decker she’s taking him to a wild party, but instead takes him to Castle Doomsday, the domain of insane Otto von Klugge, a former Gestapo sadist who has sworn to continue the war against the Allies despite Hitler’s death.

Decker becomes the prisoner of Klugge and his five “daughters;” in addition to Helga (a former actress in Nazi Germany), there’s Therese and Bertha (a pair of twins), Erna (a “busty” dancer) and Lisa (a former concentration camp guard). All five of them are of course gorgeous and devoted Nazis – save for Erna, who is only in it because Klugge has given her the opportunity to dance for a paycheck again, whereas in the previous months of German hardship she’s had to sell herself just for a Hershey bar. Also each of the girls wear revealing outfits emblazoned with swastikas, like Nazi superheroines or something.

Klugge’s method of guerrilla warfare however is pretty nutty. His castle doubles as a bar and once a week he hosts a live theater for secret Nazi loyalists where he puts up a straw dummy “prisoner,” hands out whips, and allows the patrons to whack on them as if they are back in the concentration camps! Then later he’ll go out with his five girls and one of them will get the interest of a horny American G.I.; another girl will sneak up and knock the guy out cold, and then Klugge will paint a Hitler moustache on the guy! Meanwhile Decker is trussed up throughout, made to watch and still unsure why he’s here.

Klugge’s attempts at “breaking” Decker are also goofy, making him drink endless pitchers of “good German beer.” (This is when Lisa isn’t rolling cannonballs at a bound Decker or the other girls aren’t making him play horsey and carry them across streams!) Along the way Erna develops a thing for Decker, as he’s the first man to be nice to her in forever, so of course she eventually starts coming to him at night. Finally Decker learns that he’s been kidnapped because he has access to a prison where a former SS officer is being held, and Klugge wants the man freed. Instead with Erna’s help Decker gets loose, blows off Klugge’s head with a Luger, and we learn that the “daughters” were eventually tracked down and served a few years in jail.

The “true booklength” piece is “Buried Alive: A Jap Lieutenant, Three Pleasure Girls, An American G.I.” by Richard Gallagher, who is one of my favorite men’s mag authors. And this story really lives up to its “booklength” tag…I mean, this story goes and on and on. But unfortunately it’s for the most part a snoozer. Sgt George Trumbull is a prisoner in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945 when the atom bomb hits; Trumbull, the Japanese overseer of the POW camp, and three members of the Iwasaki Women’s Labor Battalion manage to find shelter in a massive underground bunker.

Due to the massive amounts of rubble the quintet are stranded below, in what is otherwise a great shelter, complete with a few years’ worth of food. Gallagher chooses to play it all on the level, though, delivering a mostly-serious tale of survival, with Trumbull and the “Jap,” Lt. Hirata, in an endless battle of wills, while meanwhile the three women (Toshiko, Helen, and Mary – and yes they are Japanese despite their names) give their support to whichever of the two men they think is the strongest.

The problem here is Trumbull himself, who is basically a square and who takes too much of Hirata’s shit. Also you would figure that Gallagher would really play up on the “three pleasure girls” angle of the title, but Trumbull continuously spurns Toshiko’s advances, to the point where you start to go hmmm. (Another curious tenor arises when we learn that Helen and Mary develop a lesbian bond when neither Trumbull or Hirata will give it to them!) Finally though Trumbull “violently takes” Toshiko…but it’s a quick scene and not a fun one because by this point Gallagher has constantly reminded us how filthy everyone is, as Trumbull has banned anyone from “wasting” their precious water on baths.

It all just keeps grinding on, with only the occasional fun bit, like when Hirata and the gals go temporarily goofball, chasing each other around like idiots while Trumbull watches on in confusion. There’s also a fairly epic sewer rat attack. But for the most part it’s a tepid tale, monstrously blown out of proportion; it would’ve been so much better if “Baron Klugge’s Strange Fraulein Cult” had been the true booklength and this story had just been a regular extra-length tale. But anyway it all of course ends with Trumbull finally killing Hirata after yet another of the Lt’s insane attacks, and finally he and the gals reach freedom, two months after being stranded below.

“The Yank Who Escaped From Mussolini’s Secret Stockade” by Walter Kaylin is a little better; there’s an interview with Mario Puzo in the book It’s A Man’s World where Puzo states that Kaylin was his favorite of all the men’s mag writers. But this piece here treads the line a bit too much into fact-based or at least potted history, about a guy named Tony Frank who runs afoul of the fascists in Italy in 1925 and is thrown in the infamous Lipari stockade. It comes off as too much of an article and isn’t as pulpy as I would’ve preferred.

“Sgt Ivarson’s Harem of Fighting Aleut Girls” by Martin Fass is more like it. Another long story, one that actually lives up to its title. I wonder why it wasn’t included in the Noah Sarlat-edited anthology Women With Guns, as it also lives up to that anthology’s title and theme moreso than any of the actual stories in the collection. Anyway it’s August 1942 and native Alaskan Sgt. Ivarson has spent the past two months training an indiginous group of guerrillas in the Aleutian islands, stemming the Japanese invasion.

However Ivarson’s guerrilla force is actually just five teenaged girls, all that was left on Amchitka island after the initial “Jap” assault. Ivarson, along with old Eskimo guide Cumjak, trains the girls into a fierce team, and pretty soon they are pulling raids on Japanese encampments and blowing them away. And the “harem” stuff really comes into play when the lead girl, Mae, tells Ivarson that the girls have planned a celebration before their initial assault…a celebration which includes copious sake intake, dancing, disrobing, and a mass orgy, Ivarson handling all five of the gals by himself!

The pulp thrills continue with a climatic assault by the Japanese and Ivarson and the girls hiding in a mummy-filled cave; Ivarson begins hurling the mummies down at the “superstitious” Japanese, who promptly run away in fright! This was a very fun, very pulpy tale. But Martin Luray’s “The Daring Daylight Raid on Germany’s Mile-High Fortress” takes us back to the potted history route, a factual piece on a December 1943 special forces raid on La Difensa, an impregnable Nazi fortress in the Italian mountains. This campaign was also the basis for the 1968 film The Devil’s Brigade, which I’ve never seen.

The Nazi She-Devil tale in the May 1961 Male is another one that just barely qualifies – the Nazi She-Devils in Richard Gallagher’s True Book Bonus “G.I. On the Ship of Lost Frauleins” are in actuality members of the German Navy’s female auxiliary battalion. Anyway it’s September 1944 and Lt. Jesse Marcher is one of twenty Allied POWs who have been put on the SS Brunhilde, a German ship under the drunken command of Captain Voightlander. All of the POWs are airmen, but due to incorrect info on their records the Germans believe they are marine repairmen, and thus Voightlander claims that the men must be so, because German records could never be wrong.

Also on the ship are fourteen attractive German women – never expressly referred to as Nazi gals, but again the story falls into the subgenre by default. They helm various things on the ship, like the radio; the most attractive of them, Lena Schaatz, tells Marcher that she “greases Captain Voightlander’s driveshaft,” after which Marcher nicknames her “Fraulein Driveshaft.” The POWs are put to work shoveling coal in the bowels of the ship, punishment for not “admitting” they are really repairmen. This takes up a goodly portion of the narrative, Marcher coming off like a union rep as he bickers with Voightlander, who truth be told doesn’t come off as evil at all, just a guy who enjoys running a tight ship.

However this does lead to more inerraction with the gals; Voightlander keeps Lena as his personal mistress and, during one of their bicker sessions, Voightlander passes out from overdrinking and Lena takes March into the captain’s bedroom where they have sex just a few feet from Voightlander’s slumbering form. Eventually March sets it up so that the POWs sneak over to the women’s quarters each night, taking turns with the randy women. As for Lena she is up for anything, gamely sleeping with Voightlander, Marcher, and any other guy on the ship – “Germany is going to lose, and I’m just wild, wild, wild about men.”

As with the Gallagher story above it just grinds on and on with little pizzaz. Again rather than taking advantage of the salacious nature of the story’s concept and title, Gallagher instead focues on the squabblings among the men as Marcher continues to piss off Voightlander and the Germans. It all culminates with Marcher and a pal strapped as punishment to a boom mast during a heavy storm, but they survive the night, and the next day the POWs launch an assault, which itself goes on and on, the ship finally running into a Russian vessel that saves the day – and meanwhile Lena has already latched on to the Russians.

Speaking of Russians, there’s also “The Russian Spy Wore Black Lace Panties,” by Arnold Alexander. This long story is about Irma Schmidt and takes place in 1958, detailing how she got into the espionage game, sleeping with a variety of VIPs and getting information from them. “The Doomed 500 in Rommel’s Prison without Guards” is by Owen Truex and is fiction posing as a true story; Truex narrates how he was a captured POW and was sent to Stalag 353 near Tubruk in Africa, a hellish place where the commandant played games with the prisoners, letting them think they were able to escape but then cutting them down.

“The Angry Vets who Massacred a Crooked City Hall Gang” is by none other than Peter McCurtin, and it’s a very long but unfortunately tepid story about how a few hundred WWII vets banded together in Athens, TN in 1946 to wage war on a corrupt city hall regime that was ruling the populace with an iron fist. Finally “The Extraordinary Survival of James Kipness in Red China” by Martin Fass is another long tale about a Korean War vet in Tungchow province and his escape from the Reds, holing up with native Alice Kwok and waging a guerrilla war as he makes his way to safety. Okay but nothing spectacular, which pretty much sums up the majority of the tales in this review roundup.

Men's Mag Roundup: Sex Circuses, Female Barracks, and Hooker Stalags

The October 1971 issue of Male contains one of the best men’s adventure stories I’ve yet read: “Raid on the Nazis’ Sex Circus Stalag,” a “true book bonus” WWII pulp mini-masterwork by Grant Freeling. It bears some similarities to Mario Puzo’s “Barracks of Wild Blondes” in the April 1968 Man’s World, but I enjoyed Freeling’s tale even more. Puzo’s story was very good, but Freeling really delivers a fun and lurid tale with more action, sex, and Nazi-killing. Plus it’s slightly more risque; obviously the censor constraints had lessened in just a few years, to the point where even the nipples are drawn on the busty, half-dressed women in the splashpage illustration.

Taking place in July 1944, “Sex Circus” more than lives up to its title and illustration, except for the “stalag” part. Our hero is Frank Becker, an OSS agent whose left hand was chopped off by a Gestapo sadist on a previous mission. Freeling instantly captures a pulp air with Becker posing as a German officer as he rides on a train with a real SS officer, one who too is missing a left hand. Becker puts a dagger on his stump and kills the Nazi; his mission is to take this man’s place as the head of the Fontaine Circus, a French circus taken over by the Germans that now goes around with their infantry, providing thrills and women.

Becker looks enough like the slain German to pass for him; the main element was the missing left hand, but other than this intriguing opening scene Becker’s amputation doesn’t have much to do with the plot. The Fontaine Circus we learn features twenty gorgeous young girls who, in addition to performing in the circus, are also the most skilled prostitutes in Europe, and three of them are secretly Resistance agents. Arriving at the circus Becker meets up with one of them: Brigitte, a contortionist, who immediately tells Becker they’re going to have sex – she’s slept with enough real Nazis that it will be a pleasure to sleep with a fake one! And as a contortionist she promises an unforgettable time.

Becker’s two other female comrades are Yvette, a redhead with “massive breasts” who serves as the circus’s “human fly,” and Lena, an elephant trainer whose physical attributes aren’t elaborated on. She gets the best scene in the story, though, commanding her elephant, Francois, to lay down on a car full of Gestapo agents! But it’s the women who do the majority of the work, using their convenient poses as prostitutes for the circus: Brigite sneaks an infrared camera (“inside of a body cavity”) into the local castle that serves as Nazi HQ and takes photos of wall reports – with her toes – while she has sex with a German officer.

Yvette’s scene is just as fun, with her screwing and then drugging a Nazi cryptography expert, and then scaling the castle wall outside his window to a loft area where she can take intel photos. When discovered, she chops the dude in the throat and hurls him out the window to the abyss below. The finale is also great, with Becker setting the Gestapo up on “what promises to be the greatest afternoon orgy of the war,” and then Brigitte driving a jeep as Becker, with a vise on his left stump to better grip his submachine gun, mows them down. Plus he later escapes with a truck filled with wild and hungry circus animals, periodically stopping off and letting them loose on German fortifications! All told, a great, fun story, long and entertaining, and I’ll be looking for more of Freeling’s work.

“The Truth About Black and White Sex” by Hugh Hettrich, PHD, is really in touch with the early ‘70s vibe, an article posing as “research” conducted by Dr. Hettrich, speaking to white men who have slept with black, Hispanic, or Asian women. (Indian women are not counted because they’re technically of the Caucasian race, you see.) Hilariously pre-PC, we learn from these guys what the female reps of these three races are like in bed, and, even more hilariously, “how their sex life has benefited” from sleeping with them! I got the most chuckles reading the Asian portion, given that my wife is Malaysian Chinese.

“Manhunt in the Amazon Jungle” by Charles Kennan is a fast-moving revenge tale about a guy named Ron Goodwin who has gone down to the Mato Grosso region of Brazil to kill Kunkler, a jewel prospector/pirate who killed Goodwin’s brother. Goodwin works his way through each of Kunkler’s stooges before finally dealing death to Kunkler in the same way Goodwin’s brother was killed – tying him down on an ant hill. “Texas’s Bloody Treasure War” by Archer Scanlon is along the same lines, about a trio of Americans (two girls and a guy) who are looking for Pancho Villa’s fabled lost gold when bandits attack them, rape the woman, and leave them for dead – they track the bandits down but don’t kill them, just take their weapons.

“Cycle Nymph” by Larry Powell is a “special fiction” piece that caters to the then-popular biker scene. Our narrator is Pretty Boy (called that because he isn’t, of course), a biker mechanic who runs into Chance, an up-and-coming professional racer who screwed Pretty Boy over years before. Chance is now hooked up with “the blonde,” a stacked looker who Pretty Boy instantly deduces gets off on racing action. Pretty Boy eventually gets a chance to prove his theory, screwing the blonde on the race track after giving her some thrills in an impromptu race. The sex scene is actually a bit explicit, more indication that writers and artists were able to get away with more in these mags by the early ‘70s.

“World’s Wildest Sex Club” by George Younger is another piece very much of its time – the “taped transcripts” of a “Male reporter” as he’s sent to the Soho district of London to research some fabled new club where sex is for sale. Instead he meets up with a virgin hooker(!) whose skills lay in the oral department, and after a session or two she sets him up by telling him she can get him into this fabled club in exchange for 200 pounds; instead she takes the money and runs. Otherwise the story has nothing to do with the title or the photos.

The October 1962 For Men Only is from the earlier days of the Diamond line, when Noah Sarlat was still the editor. I picked this one up for the “Untold Story of the Red Army’s Female Barracks” cover story, hoping it would be something along the lines of the material in the Sarlat-edited Women With Guns. Credited to the no doubt fictional Matyas Kodaly, this first-person narrative is pretty boring and underdeveloped. Matyas is a member of the underground in Budapest, and as the story opens he and his comrades are in the midst of torturing one of the “Soviet Amazons” who have descended upon the city; we learn that this particular one took part in the burning of one of the resistance members’s family.

The story then becomes more of a standard action-piece fare, with background on how Matyas started up the resistance movement and how they fought against the Commies. The female soldiers only enter into the narrative arbitrarily, as Maytas suddenly reveals that the resistance’s ultimate goal was to get rid of Colonel Novikanya, aka “the Bitch of Budapest,” who commands the female garrison. An unpleasant finale ensues as they kidnap her after monitoring her activities and then tie her to a statue, setting her on fire. The end.

“Colonel ‘Flip’ Cochran’s Daring Glider Ambush” is a popular history piece by Glenn Infield, an author who later went on to a bit of a cottage industry churning out senastionalistic, men’s mag-style books about the Nazis. I’ve had one of his books for about twenty years now, and have been meaning to read it since then: Hitler’s Secret Life, from 1981. Anyway this story is about the Pacific theater of the war, and how Flip Cochran got his start with the “air commandos” and the tactics he taught them. A bit bland, and more of a “real” piece of WWII reporting than the pulp I wanted.

The longest story here is “Hardboiled Doll,” by Nick Quarry, an exceprt from Quarry’s 1958 novel Hoods Come Calling. There’s also “The Frankfurt-To-Hell Ordeal of Hitler’s Flying Death Trap” by AA Hoehling, which turns out to be an excerpt from Hoehling’s much-less-sensastionalistically-titlted book Who Destroyed the Hindenburg? Finally Leo Guild’s “Hollywood Sex Scenes You Never See” (an excerpt from the book Hollywood Screwballs) shows how the Censor was still making unbelieveable demands on filmmakers even in the early ‘60s.

As the cover of the January 1977 Action For Men attests, men’s mags gradually became slick Playboy-esque skin rags by the end of their existence. However they’d still run the occasional pulp piece amid the sex articles, and this particular issue features “The Breakout Bastards of Hooker Stalag,” a five-page story by Joe Dennis. I picked this one up because I was curious if, given that the magazines themselves were more explicit by this point (the nudie photos within are full-frontal), then would the WWII pulp tales also be explicit?

“Hooker Stalag” actually is – mentions of “throbbing organs” and “quick climaxes” in the sex scenes place it outside of the more-conservative pulp of earlier years. However for all that the story is mostly subpar, playing out like an episode of Hogan’s Heroes as written and directed by Bob Crane himself. The “Breakout Bastards” are a group of American and British POWs in Stalag 3Z in the final months of the war; they are under the watch of Colonel Streichmann, a German very much in the Colonel Klink mould – he is chummy with the prisoners and orders that none of them are to be harmed, as he wants to be in the Allies’s good graces once the war comes to its inevitable end.

Streichmann’s latest plan to keep the prisoners appeased is to bring in some hookers. After “balling their brains out,” the Breakout Bastards, under the leadership of one Sergeant John Fargo, continue with their plans for escape – the prisoners of Stalag 3Z are notorious escapees, having broken out of several stalags in the course of the war. Fargo and team use the whores as bait, luring one German away from a guardhouse (the whore wants to kill him, but Fargo insists on just knocking him out) so the Bastards can get past the guardhouse and tunnel their way out. A forgettable story, but it was interesting to see how these tales had changed so much toward the very end of the men’s mag genre.

“Trucker Mob Who Took Over Nevada’s Brothel Row” by Ken Lanier “as told to” Martin Crawford is a goofy narrative tapping into the redneck trucking fad of the time, and is all about a mob that takes advantage of a Nevada whorehouse and the trucker who defends the whores. Even more explicit is JD O’Hare’s “special fiction” piece “The Snatch,” a short rip-off of John Fowles’s The Collector about a guy who “collects” women and keeps them handcuffed in his apartment so he can screw them when he wants. Nasty and off-putting, it suffers from an atrocious ending where the woman, after being freed, comes back because she learned to love it!

The other stories here are mostly sex research articles, from hooker interviews to informationial pieces on “orgasm extenders” and the like. Even the letters page is completely sex-focused, with guys writing in to let the editor know how their girlfriends like to screw or whatever. In a way it’s kind of sad to see what had happened to men’s magazines – the days of stories like those collected in Women With Guns were unfortunately long gone.

Men's Mag Roundup: Mario Puzo

Before he achieved mega fame with The Godfather, Mario Puzo cut his teeth on men’s adventure magazines, where he doled out many stories under the name “Mario Cleri.” Sadly none of these stories have yet been reprinted,* and it’s a wonder some publisher didn’t come out with an anthology post-1969 to capitalize on Puzo’s sudden fame, something like Women With Guns but solely comprised of Cleri/Puzo stories. But then it seems such men’s mag anthologies dried up in the early ’60s, anyway.

Puzo’s story in the December 1967 issue of Male is “Yank Agent Who Penetrated The Nazi High Command’s Love Swap Circus,” an “extra-length” tale. Once again we have a story that sort of follows the illustration, captions, and photos – which by the way are staged shots of barely-dressed women standing around while a Nazi looks them over! (According to the credits at the back of the mag, these photos are actually from the 1966 French film Is Paris Burning?) The captions meanwhile state that the story is about “a palace of twisted pleasures…crammed with top-ranking Nazi overlords and their depraved wives and mistresses.”

Actually it’s the hero who creates this “palace,” not the Nazi overlords – and it’s a lavish apartment suite, not a palace at all. Bill Southegate is an American Military Intelligence agent whose mission is to figure out where German infantry divisions are disappearing to in late 1944. Military strategists figure that Germany’s about to make one last push in their failing war effort, so likely these missing divisions will play a part in that. Southegate is interrogating captured German Intelligence officers when he discovers that one of them is a dead ringer for himself. This officer is from a small town and was en route to his new orders in Berlin, where he was to serve on the official staff.

Southegate’s instant plan is to pose as this guy and take his place in Berlin. Born and raised in Germany, Southegate has a native’s grasp on the language. However according to his transit papers the officer also had a wife; after a quick call British Intelligence sends in a dropdead gorgeous female operative named Gaby (her undercover name; Southegate never learns her real one). Puzo gives us just the story we want when, as soon as she meets Southegate, Gaby insists that they have sex, so Southegate won’t later get jealous when she “sleeps with all the German officials in Berlin.” The ensuing sex scene doesn’t immediately fade to black; it’s not outright hardcore, but it’s there, moreso than such scenes in earlier men’s mags I’ve read.

In fact sex plays more of a focus here than regular action, as Southegate soon discovers that the Nazi high command likes to have parties where they swap wives. Gaby, a “nymphomaniac” as far as Southegate is concerned, is up for it, and within their first few nights in Berlin they’re already sleeping with other couples. Southegate rents out an apartment that has a two-way mirror, and behind it he sets up cameras and microphones. He records the ensuing orgies, but of course nothing intel-worthy comes out in the material he secretly films and tapes…I mean, why would the Nazis discuss their war strategies while screwing each other’s wives? Southegate obviously isn’t the sharpest agent in SHAEF.

When a Gestapo officer appears in the apartment during the latest orgy, Southegate realizes the jig is almost up. First he has Gaby seduce the guy into the hidden room (which is soundproofed), and there they kill him – nice gore here as Gaby shoots him in the ear with a small pistol and Gestapo brains splash everywhere. After this Gaby entertains three men in a separate room while Southegate searches their briefcases, finally getting the info he wants. When asked later what exactly she did with those three men, Gaby will only say, “We weren’t playing Monopoly, that’s for sure.”

The climax sees the duo escaping Berlin as the Germans come after them, but again there isn’t much action, playing out more on a suspense angle. All told though it was a fun story, if not a great one. Puzo’s writing is as quality as the other writers in these Diamond-line magazines, with strong characters and zero POV-hopping, though it must be stated that this story is rife with spelling and grammatical errors. I wonder if this was Puzo’s doing or if the copy editor was at lunch – speaking of which, it appears that Noah Sarlat was no longer the editor of the Diamond magazines at this time; George Fox is now credited as the Editorial Director.

Other stories: “The Mob Goddess 2000 Mafia Gunners Couldn’t Kill” is by Burt Stewart and about Anna Hoegerova, aka the Black Tulip, who got her start smuggling and now commands a global underworld empire. The story trades between straight-up fiction and psuedo-factual background detail. “I Was An Office ‘Passion Lottery’ Girl” is by Lynn Hughes “as told to” Arthur Alexander; a goofy first-person narrative by a girl who gets a job in a Manhattan ad agency where all of the higher-ups like to have sex parties. This one is graced with lots of funny staged shots of 1967 go-go girls sitting around in offices in their lingerie.

There’s also “China Bomb” by Richard Tregaskis, a “True Book” excerpt of the 1967 novel of the same title; this one’s about a war reporter who hooks up with a squad of American commandos as they hunt down the titular weapon of mass destruction. The story takes up a goodly portion of the magazine, but I skipped it, figuring maybe I’d just read the actual novel someday and not this condensed version. “All Night Date with Cindy” is by Eugene Joseph and is a funny story very much in the mold of Blue Dreams, about 36 year-old Joe Scott and how his life falls apart when gorgeous and flirtatious 17 year-old “jailbait” Cindy Whitlow moves in with Scott and his wife. She wants it, he’s afraid to give it to her, frustration and comedy ensues.

“Sgt. Jim ‘Red’ Zale’s No-Quarter Attack on the Cong’s Torture Compound” is by Erik Broske and is a Vietnam War tale that once again doesn’t have much to do with its title. There’s no “torture compound,” but the story is pulpy enough. Green Beret Sgt. Zale witnesses a VC assassination squad take out a few village elders and vows to track down the squad leader. This is the infamous Kuong, who pulp fiction-style wears a bambo half-mask over the left side of his face, hiding the hideous scarring of an old wound. It’s all like something out of the later Black Eagles series as Zale uses a young, VC-supporting kid to bait Kuong, with Zale launching a one-man war on the assassination squad. Pretty good and with some colorful gore.

Puzo’s story in the April 1968 Man’s World is a “Booklength extra,” and it really is quite long, like novella-length. Titled “Barracks of Wild Blondes,” the actual story has nothing to do with the title, but at least the illustration and photos share common elements (and once again the photos are taken from Is Paris Burning?). Seriously, there are no “barracks” here, but at least there’s a blonde – if only one, and not even a “wild” one at that. Aside from the discrepancy between title and tale, the story is very good.

Frank “Dutch” Munro is yet another Intelligence agent protagonist; his mission is to parachute into France and act as a clown in a French circus that has been commandeered by the Germans, a circus that tours with an infantry division so as to provide the troops some entertainment. Puzo captures a pulp flair immediately, though, opening with Munro murdering a Nazi-supporting French clown and then having sex with a gorgeous French circus dancing girl right there beside the corpse!

The girl is Antoinette, and we learn in the flashback that she’s a member of the French Resistance. Munro is the sole American working with them in these weeks before D-Day; his assignment is to take out the German beach defenses in this region of Southern France to aid in the Allied invasion. But first to prove himself he must murder Panuche, a lecherous drunkard of a clown who is an avid Nazi supporter and informant. After six months training as a circus clown(!), Munro is sent to France, and after staying with a family of farmers (where he sleeps with the busty daughter) he hooks up with Antoinette, who poses as his cousin so as to get him a job as Panuche’s back-up on the German circus.

Munro and Antoinette have an instant chemistry, but she’s obviously jealous that Munro would stoop to sleeping with that “cow” back on the farm, so constantly puts off his advances. After Munro proves his worth, murdering Panuche in cold blood, Antoniette finally sees that he is “truly a man.” As she helps paint up Munro’s face like Panuche’s in the conveniently-hot cabin car of the circus train, Antoinette unhooks her bra “so that her breasts, strawberry tipped, milky white and full” hang in Munro’s face, and unable to take it anymore he grabs a handful and the two go at it. Once again Puzo doesn’t shy from the details here.

Munro plans to go on stage as Panuche, for that night the circus is giving a performance for high-ranking officials right outside of a German beach defense position. Munro’s performance is so good that Captain Gruber, the German in command of the circus, instantly realizes he is an imposter – Gruber you see is a self-described “expert on clowns!” Another quick Nazi-killing and Munro and Antoinette can proceed with their plans. Here the story’s illustration comes into play, as Munro straps Antoinette and another pretty dancing girl to the spinning Wheels of Fortune – the Germans turn out in force because they believe two lucky winners will get to have sex with these women.

Instead Munro hurls some grenades from beneath his table and blows away more Gestapo with a submachine gun. More action ensues as Munro escapes with the Resistance members, firing at pursuing Nazis with an anti-tank cannon in the back of his truck. But in a goofy ending Munro finds himself in the most danger when they get to that farm back in the country, and Antoinette and the “cow” are together…Munro knows he’s in for trouble once these girls get hold of him, so he arranges for immediate departure. This was a fun story with good action and dialog.

Other stories here are “No-Holds-Barred Duel with Australia’s Man-Butcher Legion,” by Tim Gogarty; this one has a great title and art but the story is lackluster, about a dude named Pat Duncan who goes hunting for opals in Australia but runs afoul of crooks and a bloodthirsty tribe. “Health Club Tease” by Alex Austin is hilariously mistitled, as it has zilch to do with the title or the art – it’s about a married guy who meets this young chick at the bowling alley and the two start an immediate affair. The humor gist comes from the fact that they always have to screw in the cramped confines of a car. I mean, the girl isn’t a “tease” at all! “Death-Dive Attack on the Cong’s Torture Beach” by Henry I. Kurtz is another misleadingly-titled story; there’s no “torture beach,” just a string of GIs being tortured by the VC, and air cav captain Steve Pless flies in to the rescue. Okay, but nothing spectacular.

*Puzo’s story “Six Graves To Munich,” from the November 1965 issue of Male, was later expanded into a novel of the same name and published as a mass market paperback by Banner Books, as by Mario Cleri; it was adapted into a film titled A Time To Die in 1982, but Puzo had nothing to do with it. Six Graves To Munich was reprinted under Puzo’s own name in 2010, and one of these days I intend to read it.

Men's Mag Roundup: Call-Girl Temples and Amazon Queens

This is another men’s mag story I’ve wanted to read for a while – “Hitler’s Call-Girl Temple” by Hans Felix Albrecht, originally published in 1962 in A-Ok For Men but reprinted in this January 1970 issue of Adventure For Men. (In fact I suspect that most of the stories in this issue are reprints.) This story is masterful pulp, the sort of “fake history” these men’s mags excelled at. We are informed that prior to the war years the Nazis set up a Temple of Aryan Motherhood in Berlin, a four-floor structure overseen by “The Hindu:” an incense-filled abode of gorgeous German women who willingly gave themselves to the men of the Third Reich, all to propagate the Aryan seed.

Once again though the story title and captions mislead: we’re told that none of these women were call-girls, as there were too many regular women who wanted to give themselves to the cause. So the floors were always filled with visitors and their women, but the most special chamber of all was The Grand Celestial Couch of Aryan Blessedness, where highest members of the Reich were treated. One day in 1937 the Temple received a very special guest – Hitler himself, who brought along his own bedmate: a gorgeous young thing whose father disagreed with Hitler’s political views.

Albrecht informs us that Hitler could only get off on abuse, and thus is sexually excited as the girl struggles against him. But when she wisens up and starts to act like she wants him, Hitler wilts. He stands there like a bufoon as the girl ridicules him, then finally he grabs from the Hindu “the dagger of honor,” which we’re told men would use to carve a swastika on the bosoms of women they’d just had on the Celestial Couch. Hitler uses it to slice up the girl, then orders his men to kill her. Albrecht then flashes back to an earlier point, where we’re told that Hitler once had a thing for a pretty young Jewish girl named Sarah, and wanted to ask her out(!).

The story approaches slapstick as Hitler’s pals urge him to ask Sarah on a date…and when later Hitler tries to sleep with her, she resists. He again gets excited during the struggle, but again wilts when Sarah turns the tables. After this Hitler once again calls in his blackshirts, forcing Sarah to perform “unnatural sex acts” on each of them while Hitler watches. Hitler then clubs the girl on the chin with the butt of a revolver…the end! My friends, this particular men’s mag is the first I’ve read that seems to have an intentional sense of humor, and the following stories are just further indication.

“African Harem Beauties Turned Free!” by Charles V. Nemo is a psuedo-factual article about 800 wives who are now free in the Congo, filled with photos probably stolen from National Geographic. Then there’s “All You Can Eat and Drink – For Free” by Loy Warwick, a “funny” how-to on crashing parties and whatnot; the story seems like it would’ve been more appropriate in The New Yorker. “The Colonel Who Made $600 Million Queer” by Carl Sifakis is another humorous piece, about a Russian counterfeiter hired by the Nazis to help destroy England’s economy with fake pounds sterling.

“Assert Your Masculinity” by Betsy Compton is another inentionally humorous piece (at least I hope it is), about how “if a girl’s a tease – slap her in the face!” It’s filled with anecdotes about how teasing girls just need some light smacking to learn that a man’s in charge! “A Look Through the Window” by James D. Lee is a first-person piece about a drunk college sophomore who panty-raids the girls dorm; he’s careful not to wake up “old maid Miss Huff,” the girls dorm monitor. He gets in a first-floor window and the gal inside is already awake, and tells him to get in bed with her; after having stolen the nameplate on the door and stumbling home he discovers he’s just slept with Miss Huff herself! “Lusty Mistresses of Stud Island” by Gus Farrell is about black magic women on Bay Island who ravish men, and the narrator went their once, got used, and now wants to go back – he ends the story by asking if anyone wants to go along with him!

Then there’s “I Sold Girls to the Arab Slave Traders” by Rene Plankin, a very misleadingly-titled story recounted by the fictional Plankin, who we learn is an investigator hired to find a missing French girl who apparently is being sold on the Arab slave market. The short tale is all suspense, with Plankin meeting up with slavetraders and discussing terms before he is found out and must fight his way to freedom. There’s no slave-girl scene or slavemarket scene, so again we have a writer not capitalizing on the story’s lurid potential. The longest tale here is “My 20 Years with Moscow’s Secret Police” by Mikhail Antonov, straight-up torture porn as Antonov recounts various sadistic means he’d use on prisoners; the author also insinuates that the Communists actually carried out the Holocaust and leaked the photos as a smear campaign against the Nazis. More intentional humor: the editors compare the importance of this story to the publication of Dr. Zhivago!

 

Now we’re back into quality (and long) men’s mag tales – the “Diamond” line was probably the highest-quality of these magazines, all of them edited by Noah Sarlat, who gave us Women With Guns. This first Male annual, from 1963, is massive, well over 100 pages and packed with long, fully-developed stories and great art. However I tracked it down for a story that isn’t even mentioned on the cover: “The Amazon Queen Who Ruled An Experimental Sex Outpost,” by Martin Faas. I mean, what a title!! I discovered this gem via the fantastic Lynn Munroe Books site, where a scan of the story’s splashpage is posted:

But here once again we have a story that doesn’t match (or live up to) its title or captions. It’s my sad duty to inform you that the “experimental sex outpost” angle isn’t even mentioned in Faas’s story, and the Amazon queen, Ilse Todt, is nowhere mentioned as once having been a “Nazi love camp doctor.” Indeed it is her brother Otto who was a doctor, in a concentration camp! Our hero is Harry Remick, an engineer exploring the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in 1947. He encounters Otto and Ilse Todt; Ilse comes to Remick’s bed that night and some good lovin’ ensues. Ilse is sort of a proto-hippie girl, very free-spirited and fun loving; she is in fact the exact opposite of the Nazi She-Devil I expected.

Otto however is a stone cold Nazi and, a few months later, Remick stumbles upon the kingdom he has erected deep in the Mato Grosso. It’s a full Nazi compound with giant swastika, concentration camps, and an army of Calapolo Indians, each of whom is armed with submachine guns and who have swastikas etched onto their metal armbands! (The bit about Ilse using them to “create a new master race” is another element that only exists in the captions and not the story itself.) Ilse is happy to see Remick, goofing around with her playful sense of humor and then later screwing him while a few native girls watch – Ilse wanting to show them how it’s really done.

But Remick is sickened by Otto, who apparently plans to use the Indians as live test subjects. Turns out Otto arranged for Ilse to sleep with Remick so as to ensnare him – Otto knew that eventually Remick would come down here looking for her, as he’d want her again. And so Remick has fallen into his trap: Otto needs Remick’s help to melt gold or something. Remick is kept imprisoned and is even given his own Calapolo bride – after Otto has had ceremonial sex with her in front of the congregation.

Once Remick discovers that the Indians had a ruler whom Otto kicked out, he tracks the man down and works it so that he can return in triumph to the people, who then turn on Otto and kill him. Ilse is spared, and the two part ways, Ilse returning to Germany – again, there’s no indication that she’s “evil” per se, other than going along with Otto’s whims. The story by the way is adorned with “actual photos” of Remick and Ilse – obviously misappropriated shots of random people. Sounds like the sort of thing you could get sued for these days.

The feature story is “Imprisoned For Six Months in Japan’s Secret Female Garrison” by Richard Gallagher, who gave us “Five Greek Girls to Istanbul” in Women With Guns, my favorite story in that anthology. And here too his writing is masterful and fun. This is an extra-long tale, longer even than the typical “true booklength” Male stories, and originally appeared in the June 1960 issue of Stag.

Lt. Amos Brennan crashes his one-man sub during a naval assault on Okinawa in April 1945, and washes up on Kori Shima island, which it turns out is home to the “secret female garrison” that is the Iwasaki women’s contingent. One of the women stabs Brennan in the arm with her bayonet, and she’s about to use him for further practice when her superior pulls her away. (Brennan later dubs the girl “Bayonet Betty,” as she’s always chomping at the bit to further slice him up.) Brennan discovers that the island is filled solely with women – and per men’s mag tradition, we are informed that they’re “ample-breasted for Japanese girls.”

In charge of the garrison is the beautiful Sergeant Homma, a refined type who speaks English and enjoys conversing with Brennan; we’re informed that she likes to wear boots, shorts, and “a tunic too tight and too open to be considered military.” She is somehow related to the General Homma who ordered the infamous Bataan Death March, but won’t elaborate. Gallagher treads the line between pulp and reality; Brennan’s life doesn’t become an orgiastic excess of one ample-breasted Japanese gal after another. Instead the women construct a cage for him, one that is hoisted up off the ground each night. During the day his allotted task is to saw wood while one of the women stands guard, her rifle trained on him.

Only gradually does the pulpier stuff come into play. As expected, Homma comes to Brennan one afternoon and tells him she wants him to wash her back. Homma is very military and professional and in the same matter-of-fact tones she then informs Brennan that she wants him to make love to her. Brennan, sensing that he is in a contest of wills with her, takes Homma roughly, which she appears to enjoy. After which she gives Brennan the rest of the day off! After that it’s back into Brennan’s human-sized birdcage, with the occasional run-in with one of the guards – Gallagher provides an entertaining fight between Brennan and Bayonet Betty, who basically beats the shit out of him with judo and akido.

Gallagher’s style is great, as is all of the writing I’ve so far read in the Diamond line of magazines. No POV-hopping, good characterization, good dialog, good action. When the Americans finally show up on Kori Shima Gallagher provides another entertaining action sequence, though as expected per men’s mag tradition the Japanese ladies can’t fight for a damn, some of them shooting in the wrong direction – but then, Homma informs Brennan that the Iwasaki contingent is made up of common women, not soldiers; a last-ditch Japanese attempt to bolster the army. Also, this is another story graced with photos of random people who are supposed to be our characters!

The other WWII stories in the mag are very air warfare-focused, which admittedly isn’t much my thing. There’s “Destroy Cologne at Midnight” by Len Guttridge, about the RAF strike on that German city, and also “Deadly Twins” by Martin Sol, about a pair of ace pilots who have a running bet on who can shoot down the most Germans. There’s also “The Strange Navy Flyer Who Carried His Gunner Across New Guinea,” by Frederic Wakeman, the unwiedly title of which aptly sums up the (very long) story – which in fact turns out to be an excerpt from Wakeman’s 1960 novel A Free Agent.

On a non-war angle there’s “Border Nymph” by Nick Quarry, the narrative of a private eye as he hunts down an elusive “Indian” girl; this one’s an excerpt from Quarry’s 1960 novel No Chance In Hell. Finally we have some various articles and cheesecake layouts; one of the articles is titled “Those Single Girls Who Like To Fool Around With Married Men,” another one whose title aptly sums up the article, which is filled with a psychologist’s comments on why certain girls go for married men…an informative article which unfortunately fails to answer one very important question: Where can these girls be found??