Thursday, June 24, 2021

The Baroness #10: A Black Hole To Die In (unpublished volume)


The Baroness #10: A Black Hole To Die In, by Paul Kenyon
Undated manuscript, circa Fall 1976

I’ve been interested in this unpublished volume of The Baroness since I learned about it years ago on the Baroness Yahoo Group, where series author  Donald “Paul Kenyon” Moffitt revealed – via an interview with ppsantos – that the plot concerned a black hole in outer space. Given Moffitt’s later ventures in sci-fi, A Black Hole To Die In offered a lot of potential; each volume of the series had an overlay of science fiction, at least insofar the gadgets Penny “The Baroness” St. John-Orsini employed on her assignments, but this one sounded like it could go even further in that direction. But as it turns out, A Black Hole To Die In stays fairly grounded for the majority of the narrative, until literally blasting off into space in the final pages. 

One thing to point out at the start is that this manuscript made me revisit my assumption of when Moffitt was writing. Internal evidence, which I’ll document, indicates that A Black Hole To Die In was written no earlier than September of 1976. This changes everything I speculated about in my review of the previous unpublished manuscript, #9: Death Is A Copycat.  It is now evident that Moffitt was writing this manuscript long after the last official installment of the series, #8: Black Gold, was published, in February of 1975. In that Yahoo Group Moffitt also stated he became ill after writing Black Gold and took some time off; when he returned he wrote these two manuscripts, only to find out later that the series was cancelled. However we know that Death Is A Copycat was published in France, in January of 1976, given the info at this site. This would indicate that Moffitt certainly wrote Death Is A Copycat in 1975, or even late 1974. Given this, I propose that Moffitt, writing on that Yahoo Group many decades later, had his dates and titles confused – maybe it was after he wrote Death Is A Copycat, not Black Gold, that he became sick, hence the delay until he wrote A Black Hole To Die In in late 1976. 

Unfortunately, as will be seen from the screenshots below, the 285-page manuscript of A Black Hole To Die In is in pretty bad shape. The paper is very yellowed and the typescript has faded over the decades, making for a sometimes-difficult read. I get the impression that this is a copy Moffitt made for himself before mailing the original to Engel, given the sometimes-blurry nature of the print, but who knows. Again, it’s a miracle it even exists, and I’m only just pointing this out now so as to explain why the screenshots might be a little hard to read. Also as you can tell by the manuscript title page above, so far as Moffitt was concerned this was the tenth volume of the series; in other words there’s no accounting for Robert Vardeman’s also-unpublished installment, Quicktime Death.

As with the review for Death Is A Copycat, I’ll be even more comprehsensive in this review than I usually am…as before, this will be more of a blow-by-blow account of the manuscript, given its unpublished nature. Off the top I’ll say I mostly enjoyed A Black Hole To Die In, save for some issues with the climax, but as with the previous unpublished installment it’s a shame it never made it to print. Moffitt continues to be fully invested in the series, resulting in a very entertaining read. There was also a special vibe to this one given that it was the last Baroness novel Moffitt ever wrote – indeed, there is a definite air of finality to the climax. That being said, I don’t think Moffitt intended this as a “series finale,” as I’ll detail below. 

The opening gets back to the usual series template; as we’ll recall, Death Is A Copycat was unique in that it opened with Penny herself, driving in the French countryside. Most every other installment opened with some world-threatening incident, followed by a meeting of US intelligence chiefs who would argue over who should handle the situation, with the Baroness ultimately getting the gig. All this happens here; the inciting incident however isn’t of the dire ramifactions of previous threats. At least initially. In what seems a tribute to the film version of You Only Live Twice, we read as a Russian spacecraft, looking to hurriedly build a 50-man space station to get superiority over the US, vanishes in space…to the total confusion of the control center back in Russia. 

From here to the usual intel briefing, where the CIA et al argue with each other; they monitor all Russian space activities and are under the mistaken assumption that the commies have developed the ability to cloak their spacecraft from monitoring devices. Ultimately “Coin” gets the assignment to find out what’s going on, with the caveat that the Russian bear must not be poked too much. This leads to the fun sequence of John Farnsworth, aka Penny’s handler “Key,” looking at himself in his bathroom mirror as he’s about to shave and then suddenly finding his NSA contact looking at him through the mirror. More of Moffitt’s spy-fy stuff, with the mirror actually being a video conference screen that masks Farnsworth’s face from the NSA man. 

After getting the assignment Farnsworth calls in “Coin,” aka Penny, who happens to be on vacation: “The Baroness had spent most of her summer playing with her new seven-million-dollar toy, a 300-foot yacht that she’d christened the Reynaldo”, after her second husband, the Baron Orsini.” Farnsworth records his orders to Penny and sends the message to Greece, where she’s vacationing, via MESTAR satellite. More weird sci-fi stuff ensues as Tom Sumo abruptly appears on Farnsworth’s TV screen – another “bug” the electronics wiz has set up to keep in contact with the various team members – and cries that Penny’s “dead,” or at least will be: the Athens CIA branch has been compromised and Farnsworth’s message will be intercepted, just as Sumo himself has intercepted it. Thus when Penny goes to pick it up via prearranged scenario at the Athens branch she’ll be walking into a hit. 

Penny’s intro has her scuba diving topless near Aphros, Greece (“One ought to swim naked in the Aegean.”), searching for an ancient Phoenician statue of the love goddess Astarte. As I predicted, Hughes from the previous two volumes is gone and not once mentioned; when we meet her, the Baroness’s latest stud is Valentin Stark, “a bronze, slightly dissolute Apollo with a big, golden-curled head and devil-may-care face.” As with most of Penny’s men he’s rich and handsome, “heir to a supermarket fortune and a playboy reputation.” He also has an interest in archeology, hence this effective intro in which he and Penny search for the statue. An unusual element here is that some of Penny’s team are on vacation with her: Skytop, Wharton, Inga, and Eric are all also aboard and helping with the underwater search (and apparently unfazed by the sight of Penny’s “bare breasts” as she traipses around the yacht). Penny’s discovery of the statue is especially apt: 


Penny furthers the image by stripping off her trunks and floating here forty feet underwater in the same position as the statue – kneeling, offering her breasts to her supplicants. She then takes her scuba knifes and hacks at Val’s crotch(!), as if inspired by those ancient supplicants who would literally castrate themselves for the goddess. Instead Penny’s goal is to slice a “gash” in Val’s wetsuit, which she somehow manages to do rather than castrating him. This leads to an underwater sex scene, which on my initial perusal of the manuscript I mistakenly assumed was a zero-gravity sex sequence. Given the “floating” imagery, it’s not easy to see why I was confused: 


Moffitt pours on the kink factor here; complete with Penny taking off her mouthpiece long enough to give Val a b.j., and then Val returning the favor – his mask rubbing against her thighs and adding “piquancy to the delicious sensasion.” Not to mention the “little orgasm” Penny enjoys given the “icy shock” of the seawater that gets inside her as Val spreads her legs further. This leads to a “rotary” style of underwater sex, as Penny “rotate[es] like some massive piece of machinery around the shaft that [Val] had plugged into her socket:” 


Before long we have the memorable image of Penny “fondl[ing] one of the [statue’s] golden breasts in sisterly salute!” This is probably one of the most out-there sex scenes in the entire Baroness series, Moffitt leaving no kinky stone unturned – we’re even informed how that gash Penny cut in Val’s wetsuit has resulted in “flaps of rubber” that “whisked round [Penny’s] mound of Venus like an erotic gasket.” A sequence that comes to the usual whopping mutual-climaxes finale we know and love from the series, with Penny “sandwiched between the metal breasts of the goddess and Val’s broad, rubber sheathed chest.” This leads to that other mainstay of the series, one that went missing in the previous volume – when Penny finds Val immediately ready for round two, she checks her watch to see how much time’s left in their tanks, only to see that she’s receiving a secret coded message from Farnsworth. Duty calls. 

One thing I enjoy about reading older books is to see how long certain phrases have been in the vernacular; here I learned that “banging” was being employed for sex even in the mid ‘70s (I was under the impression “balling” was more frequently used at the time, but maybe that was a hippie thing). Val is ready for another round despite the dwindling air tanks, because, “Even five minues was worth it when you were sampling the Baroness, but they’d been banging one another an average of seven or eight times a day since the start of the voyage, and he wouldn’t mind waiting till they got topside to do it properly.” But Penny has to get going, which leads to another humorous image of her, Val, and the statue being lifted out of the sea to the awaiting crew – with Penny still “stark naked” and Val’s “prong…sticking out of a hole in his rubber trunks.” Val takes umbrage at Penny’s sudden “impulsive” announcement that she must go to Athens, but Penny’s crew intervenes as our heroine goes to her quarters to change. Once again Moffitt brings a trash fiction vibe to men’s adventure with the opulent décor: 


As predicted Penny walks into a trap; Farnsworth’s coded message has her entering the Acropolis to meet her CIA contact. But Penny, armed only with her small automatic, quickly discovers it’s a hit attempt. This leads to the first action scene in the novel, as well as a surprise appearance, as Penny turns around in a darkened colonnade to find an “old man” – a tour guide she passed on her way into the Acropolis – has snuck up on her and is holding a .45 pistol: 


Farnsworth explains that he’s gotten to Athens in three hours via “The SR-71 experimental job,” ie the Blackbird. But there’s another hitman, one with a heavy machine gun hidden in an old-fashioned camera tripod, and Penny takes him out in her preferred method: using her bare hands while she’s completely naked: 


After taking out a few more of the terrorists – including one whose eyeballs Penny stabs out with her fingers – Farnsworth and the Baroness repair to a tavern, where Penny’s clued in on the assignment. Humorously, both of them discount the theory of the “idiots in Washington” that the Russians have come up with a way to cloak their spacecraft; clearly something bad has happened to the ship and the Soviets are trying to hide it. Given that “détente” prevents Penny from going into Russia via Afghanistan with a commando team, she decides to head to England along with Eric and Skytop. They meet with Sir Percival, the Astronomer Royal; Penny declares that she’s “doing journalism” because it’s “all the rage this year. Candace is doing it, of course, and Pia, and Jackie and Marisa and Margaux.” 

Here Penny learns via radar data that the Russian craft mysteriously vanished. This leads Penny to Professor Ralph Earle, who has Percival’s data on the disappeared ship, and who might be a target for Russian assassins because of it. This leads to the introduction of the most outrageous villain yet in The Baroness, “the Zhook,” a creepy Russian assassin who seems to have lurched in from a horror novel:


The Zhook turns out to even be stranger, with “empty eyes” and scarred sockets hidden by goggles, and anatomy that clicks when he moves. I have a hunch Moffitt was inspired by Peter Lorre’s character Dr. Gogol in the 1935 horror flick Mad Love.  This leads to a bizarre fight in a darkened computer room as the Zhook, on all fours “like a beetle” and able to see in the dark, gets the better of Penny, Skytop, and Eric. In fact he only doesn’t kill them because he’s in a hurry; even man-mountain Joe Skytop is injured badly, Eric gets a concussion, and Penny considers lucky that “her liver and transverse colon [are] unruptured.” 

After this per series template the Baroness assembles her team and sends them out on various assignments. Since Professor Earle has been killed, the goal is to find some other scientist who might’ve made some headway on the data about the missing Russian ship and figure out what happened to it. We get what appears to have been the start of a new series gimmick in that this is the second volume in a row in which someone smokes a joint during Penny’s team briefing; this time it’s Fiona. (“Real Panama gold, from Nippy’s private stash!”) Also here we get what I believe is the first indication that Fiona has her eyes on the ultra-reserved Wharton, thinking of him as “one of her unfinished projects.” 

Speaking of Fiona, she and Tommy have a run-in with the Zhook shortly afterwards; sent to round up two prominent astrophysicists at a conference, they find that these men have been abducted by the Soviets. Fiona has an off-page encounter with the Zhook, sprawled unconscious with her “breasts spilling out” of her torn dress when Tommy finds her. When Tommy asks “Are you…,” Fiona responds, “Did he rape me, you mean? Lord, no! Even a Russian isn’t that quick.” Again the team is lucky to have survived, as they find the corpse of a girl in the scientists’s bathroom, “broken in half like a doll,” same as Professor Earle was. This is a specialty of the Zhook with his superhuman strength, and the only reason Fiona wasn’t killed too was because the Zhook was in a hurry. Meanwhile Wharton heads to Harvard to check on an Indian astrophysicist who may be able to help out. Here Moffitt indulges in his obvious science interests, with the professor, Singh, giving a lecture on black holes and how they threaten the stability of the universe: “Since a black hole must continue to collapse until it reaches the point of zero volume and infinite density, the whole universe will necessarily become such a Swarzschild singularity – go down the drain, in other words.” 

Wharton also strikes out – Singh is abducted seconds before he arrives – and next we move on to Paul and Yvette (ie the black members of the team) in California. Moffitt doesn’t mention the grim torture Yvette experienced in the previous volume, but then The Baroness never had much in the way of continuity to begin with. We meet them as they are having a candlelit dinner, but in a humorous reveal this turns out to be a commercial they’re filming for a product called Orasan, “The oral spray with sex appeal.” Sumo’s sci-fi electronics strike again, as he and the Baroness give Paul and Yvette their assignment – to find another scientist – through the mirror mounted inside Yvette’s makeup case. They strike out as well when they hunt down their scientist, getting in a fight with the Russians who take him, as well as a pair of redneck cops. The two get out of custody, and next we see them they’re back with the Baroness in England, “their eyes red-rimmed with jet lag.” 

Here we learn that Dr. Hunnicut, yet another astrophysicist, has also been abducted, right out of a CIA safehouse. The difference with Hunnicut is that we briefly met him at the start of the novel; the intel heads retained his services to look into the data about the disappeared spacecraft. The narrative picks up here as Penny decides to hit the Russians, détente be damned. They’ll abduct a Russian astrophysicist themselves; one happens to be staying at the Russian embassy. Meanwhile we learn that a Russian spy has somehow figured out that Penny is the elusive “Coin” who is wanted dead by the Soviets, and plans to make the score solo for his own benefit. 

The Baroness puts on a disguise and passes herself as “a rich, crotchety old woman,” with Inga as her nurse. Meanwhile Fiona poses as the Baroness, and the guys on the team pose as “rock musicicians on their way to a gig,” complete with Paul hiding a Galil assault rifle in a hollowed-out guitar. Penny’s disguise is so as to fool the KGB watcher, while meanwhile a car with Skytop and Paul try to divert the Russians who are escorting the astrophysicist out of the embassy. In the firefight Skytop loses an earlobe: 


Penny, still disguised as an old lady, manages to take out the KGB crew shepharding the Russian scientist to Heathrow. This is a nicely-done scene which sees Yvette sporting a big false afro that hides a bomb. They manage to capture the scientist, but then Penny herself is captured – by the solo Russian agent who has figured out she is the infamous Coin. This leads to a somewhat goofy bit where an injured Paul limps back to the others and informs them the Baroness is “dead,” which comes off as repetitious given that Tom Sumo declared the exact same thing at the opening of the novel. Heck, maybe Moffit subconsciously suspected this would be the final installment, hence all these “The Baroness is dead!” freakouts. Meanwhile we see that the solo Russian who abducted Penny is…none other than Alexey, the GRU commando who first appeared in #3: Death Is A Ruby Light and then again in #9: Death Is A Copycat

Penny delcares “It’s been a long time” since she last saw Alexey, and we get a brief rundown of their time in Death Is A Ruby Light, with the events of Death Is A Copycat rendered as a mere “The last time we met, you let me live,” from Alexey. Who by the way has Penny completely nude; she awakens to find her entire body stiff and her private parts feeling “greasy” from obviously having been searched. Given that Alexey appeared in the previous volume, this makes one wonder how long A Black Hole To Die In occurs after Death Is A Copycat; the Baroness herself clearly thinks it’s been a while. But as I noted above, I think this is because Moffitt was writing this volume over a year after he wrote Death Is A Copycat

Alexey is under the impression Penny has been “murdering KGB agents and kidnapping Nobel Prize winners;” he has no idea that this is an “eye for an eye” retaliation for the American scientists the Russians have been kidnapping. In fact, Alexey was here in England to spy on the Shah of Iran and only discovered Penny’s presence by accident; he knew she was Coin from Death Is A Ruby Light, and decided to capture her for his own advancement. But at this point the two are, once again, uneasy allies; Alexey informs Penny that “the Zhook” is really a guy named Zhukalov, his nickname Zhook (Russian for “click-beetle”) courtesy the KGB agents who fear him. (We also learn by this point that Alexey and Penny have already “made love once, on the leather couch, just to take the edge off.”) 

We learn that the Zhook came to his mutilated state courtesy the Germans, who captured him when he was very young and working behind German lines in the last days of WWII. They “tore his arms and legs out of their sockets,” which now results in that clicking sound when he moves. And did more horrible things: 


As for the Zhook’s ability to see in the dark, that is due to Chinese agents in 1960 throwing “some sort of caustic substance into his eyes” which blinded him. However only the lens of his eyes were destroyed, leaving behind a scarred reitna and iris in each eye. The lenses were replaced with clear glass; Penny surmises that this is what gives the Zhook the ability to see in the dark, but Alexey scoffs at the idea as “supernatural.” Penny insists that the Zhook “can see beyond the spectrum of visible light,” as “his ultraviolet filter is in his glasses, not his eyes,” meaning the Zhook can “switch from one sort of vision to the other whenever he wants.” Oh and he gets his “source of illumination” from a “black-light lantern hidden in that shroud of a suit he wears.” 

Given that the Zhook basically runs his own team in the KGB, both Alexey and Penny assume he is the one behind all the scientist snatches, and Alexey decides to help out, for once again it is in “the interest of both our nations” to free all these various kidnapped scientists. After that’s decided, it’s on to the hardcore sex; we rejoin the Baroness and Alexey as they’re about to enjoy their ninth round, Penny having to encourage Alexey to go at it again. Moffitt injects some humor in the scene with the buttons on the leather couch hurting Alexey’s back, so they repair to a wooden chair for the, uh, climax:


Next we jump ahead a week. Penny’s relaxing in her opulent London hotel with Inga as ever at her side. No mention is made of how the team thought Penny was dead just a few pages ago; Moffitt has left the reunion between Penny and her team off-page. Alexey sneaks into Penny’s hotel, posing as a waiter, to inform her that “The Zhook is holding your scientists prisoner in a fortified villa on the Black Sea coast, near Yelta.” While Alexey says the prisoners have not been ill-treated, he says it is a “bad place…the scum of the Soviet intelligence services are assigned there, sadists, psychopaths…the KGB brass stay away from the place.” We see that the place is beautiful on the outside but nightmarish on the inside; a Russian official visits the villa to check on the condition of the scientists, who are kept in a rat-filled dungeon. Again it’s like a horror novel as the Zhook follows a scientist who has escaped down a sewage tunnel and breaks him into pieces. 

The Baroness and team head to Istanbul, where Tom Sumo reveals “experimental wetsuits” he’s created from NASA spacesuits that were designed for “exploring planets with corrosive atmospheres.” Described as a “snakeskin,” it has “friction pads” on the fingertips so you can grip a gun and hold things; the suit itself is too slippery to even pick up. It sounds very much like the “plastic suit” in another series produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel, John Eagle Expeditor


Penny quickly proves this “slipperysuit” is effective in combat. She challenges Skytop to attack her: “And no faking. If you break one of my ribs, I’ll buy you that Zeiss F 0.7 lens you’ve had your eye on – the one Kubrick used.” But try as he might, Skytop’s unable to even get a hold of the Baroness, who continuously slips out of his grip. Indeed I get the impression Moffitt might’ve been inspired by that other Engel-produced series, as the slipperysuit is next proven to be knife-proof. Penny commands Paul to come at her with a knife, and it merely “slither[s] along the surface of the fluorocarbon fabric without penetrating it.” Penny suspects the suit could only stop a “glancing hit” from a bullet; “I felt that knife edge! With a high-velocity bullet, the shock wave travelling through your body fluids would kill you.” As readers of John Eagle Expeditor recall, Eagle has a special pair of infrared googles for his plastic suit. And so too does the Baroness for hers; the “snake eyes,” which Sumo just made for her:


As usual Penny’s plan is to make a show of herself, thus she has a big party on her yacht in Instanbul, inviting all her jet-setting friends. It’s a big affair, complete with a “rock band from London” that’s “taking a hash break” as the chapter opens. This is the Baroness’s “Black Sea Bash,” with all the glitterati in attendance, so close to the Crimean coast that Soviet jets are doing flybys and a submarine is tracking the yacht. We get the usual cast of partying nobles and jet-setters, complete with a jokey reference to Peter Benchley and Jaws: one of the guests is “the young novelist whose book about a killer whale was making its second million dollars.” 

Penny slips off and begins a 12-mile swim to the coast with the rest of the team, all garbed in the wetsuits (Skytop and Wharton wear jocks under theirs, we’re informed, while everyone else is naked), pulled along by “screws” created by Sumo that are made of “synthetic resilin protein – same stuff that lets a flea jump hundreds of times its own length.” So as to not set off any monitoring devices they have no metal on them; even the guns are made of “radar-transparent plastic.” The screws look like black whips and churn the water “in a rotary motion;” given the frequency of how often “rotary position” appears throughout A Black Hole To Die In, I’m going to chalk it up as some intentional thematic work on Moffitt’s part. The team goes in through the rat-infested sewer – the offal sliding right off their suits – and breaks out the scientists one by one. Penny’s appearance through the latrine drain in one scientist’s cell is particularly memorable: 


The team begins springing the other scientists from their individual cells. After this Penny puts the slipperysuit in action against some guards, also wielding the trident she used during the swim here:


There follows a big gunfight with the Baroness and Eric (whose foot is broken by a bullet that glances off the suit) holding off hordes of approaching Russians. Penny ends up holding them off on her own as Eric makes his escape: 


Penny’s trapped in the cell, and gets out in a novel way – she takes a hostage, straps all of her plastique to his “testes,” and shoves him back out into the cell to his waiting comrades! In the diversion she makes her escape. But on her way through the sewer to reconnect with the others she finds the Zhook waiting for her – Eric’s twisted body in his grip, “limp as death.” An effective sequence as the two size each other up, Penny just as able to see in the dark as the Zhook is, thanks to her infrared goggles. Despite her own superheroic skills, the Baroness is no match for the Zhook, who does his best to crush her to pulp. When all seems lost Penny snaps him with her backup “screw,” which Sumo earlier warned could be used as a brutal weapon – its coils are wound up to slowly power a 12-mile swim. But if they were to be unwound all at once on a human victim it would make for a gory spectacle, as the Zhook discovers. It goes on for a while, the Zhook being crushed to death to the point that he screams for his mother, until finally we get this memorable image: 


As with the fakeout with Yvette at the end of Death Is A Copycat, Eric’s wounds turn out to be a lot less terrible than Moffitt implied; we learn he just has a few cracked ribs. The scientists are taken to Penny’s yacht, and we get more of the “Black Sea Bash” stuff as we jump ahead a few hours and see Russian soldiers boarding the boat and looking agog at the drunk and high revellers aboard. The Russians leave after being threatened with starting a diplomatic incident, and after this…Moffitt applies the breaks. A Black Hole To Die In descends into a mire of exposition and TV-watching as first the scientists explain what the Russians have discovered…then the Russians discuss it amongst themselves…then the US President discusses the exact same stuff with the scientists, and etc. 

Long story short, the Russian space ship disappeared due to a “mini black hole” in Earth’s orbit, one that’s “no bigger than a virus.” Despite its microscopic size, it has the weight and density of a star, thus sucks anything into it. The Russians, we learn, plan to send multiple spaceships up there to harness the black hole into a source of unlimited energy; Moffitt capabaly makes it all seem possible as a Russian scientist explains his plan to the Premiere. Meanwhile we learn from the US scientists – the ones Penny rescued – that the black hole threatens the Earth, given that it’s entered Earth’s orbit and could easily wipe out the planet. Moffitt works in the mysterious Tunguska explosion of 1908, which is often theorized as being caused by a meteor; one of the scientists explains it was really the black hole, which follows a “comet trajectory” and actually passed through the Earth that time. This time, given that the hole is bigger, the impact will be even more catastrophic. 

But the US can’t do anything because, given the “dwindling” funds for the Space Race, there are no operational Saturn rocks left over from the Apollo Program. So friends believe it or not but the first half of this climax features the Baroness and team watching television as the various networks report on the mass Russian spacecraft launches – complete with Barbara Walters and Walter Cronkite giving reports! So basically the Russians are turning it into a media spectacle, launching three ships at once with several men in space at the same time. The intent being that they are staking the black hole as their own. And going about the process of harnessing it for energy: 


Then the Chinese launch their own spaceship to interfere, having gotten the intel thanks to one of the scientists Penny’s team freed; a guy named Dr. Hsu who managed to escape her and get back to China with the info. So ridiculously enough, Penny and team continue to watch television as now the Chinese enter the race for the mini black hole. Our heroine finally gets re-engaged with the plot when she calls Farnsworth and demands that he scramble an SR-71 for her – with Wharton flying it – so Penny can parachute over the Chinese rocket complex at Shwangchengtze. Aerial photography implies that the Chinese are about to rush up another rocket, “to get in the black hole business.” Penny plans for there to be another “passenger” on that rocket – herself! When Farnsworth says she’d be unable to jump out of an SR-71, given that it basically flies in space, she responds, “Then I’ll need a space suit, won’t I, darling?” 

Before we can get to this, though, Penny watches more TV, as NBC reports that the Chinese spacecraft has “extracted a cylindrical module from the booster…about the size of the special docking adapter that allowed the American Apollo craft to link up with the Russian’s Soyuz ship back in 1975.” The Apollo-Soyuz linkup occurred in July of 1975. So here we have our first internal indication that A Black Hole To Die In was written at least by then. We get more confirmation of this as Penny, who flies her LearJet to Hawaii to rendevous with the SR-71, watches even more TV – and this time it’s “Yuri Fokin, the veteran announcer who had covered the Apollo-Soyuz mission.” However as we will soon learn, Moffitt was writing even later than the summer of 1975…something that is also indicated by that “back in 1975” in the dialog above. 

At any rate, once again action is relayed via TV coverage as the commander of the twelve-man Russian space station informs viewers that the Chinese spaceship is being “extremely reckless” with its close approach. We also see how the times have changed, as per Penny the “worldwide audience” is clearly rooting for the Russians, and “whatever happened could be turned into anti-Chinese propaganda.” You don’t see too much of that these days! But again, Penny here just watches TV as the Chinese “ram” the Russian space station and overtake it, killing all the cosmonauts with weapons that look like “underwater spear guns.” 

More TV coverage ensues as the Chinese overtake the station and “blackmail” the US and USSR with threats of destruction. This is a great bit from Moffitt, who has the Chinese issuing their demands but insisting they are a “people of peace.” How little things change!  More exposition follows as the President argues with his intel chiefs that nothing can be done, as does the Premiere with his underlings – both leaders also try to cancel a mission a sole agent of theirs is undertaking to stop the threat, only to be told its too late. Meanwhile Wharton flies the Baroness over the Gobi desert and she bails out, dressed in an astronaut helmet and an experimental NASA pressure suit: 


It’s night in the desert when she lands and she’s immediately spotted by a trio of Mongols. After killing one of them, Penny – who is still in her spacesuit and helmet – bluffs that she’s from the rocket base, speaking in perfect Mandarin. The Mongols demand she take off the helmet, to prove she’s Chinese. Penny hesitates a moment, and then: 


We later learn that her body has also been “dyed to make her look Chinese, and even her nipples ha[ve] been colored brown.” The disguise works for a while, but Penny ends up fighting the last two Mongols anyway, crushing one’s throat in her usual favored move. But then she’s caught unawares by another guy who comes out of the darkness – one who knows who she is. It is of course Alexey, who returns to the narrative once again – he was the solo agent the Premiere was trying to stop. Alexey says he recognizes Penny despite the Chinese disguise, because “nobody has a body like yours.” Alexey relates how he’s gotten here on his own desperate solo quest to stop the Chinese, and again he and Penny decide to work together. It’s curious that Moffitt has shown this sudden interest in Alexey; after appearing in the third volume he was gone and forgotten, until abruptly reappearing in the last pages of Death Is A Copycat, to return again here. 

Regardless, he and Penny once again get on famously – despite the fact that the world’s about to end and they’re alone in the middle of the desert, surrounded by a few million enemy, Penny and Alexey find the time to engage in some hardcore shenanigans: “She rode his long, stiff shaft with a steady in-and-out motion, taking it slow at first, lifting her tail at the end of each stroke.” As typical with the series this goes on for a few pages, and we learn that, once again, it’s their tenth round! The show gets back on the road as Alexey and Penny split up to get into the base; Penny is buried in the sand and manages to secretly board a train headed for the rocket site. 

Penny wants on the base because earlier she planted a bug up the ass of Hsu, the scientist she rescued who turned out to be a Chinese agent. (One that’s “too small” for Hsu to even notice, we’re informed!) She wants “fifteen minutes” with him to ask him a few questions. Using a directional finder that’s locked on the bug, she hunts him down in the rocket base. We also learn that the Baroness has no plans to “get out of here alive.” It always surprises me how brutal Penny can be; she tracks Hsu to a blockhouse from which various scientists are entering and exiting. Penny spots her chance when a tall Chinese woman comes out, a nurse or somesuch. Penny lassos her into the darkness and, after saying “Sorry, sweetie,” proceeds to strangle her. “She made it as quick and painless as possible, but it’s never nice.” Just imagine Mack Bolan or John Eagle strangling a nurse! 

Here we get our firmest indication of when A Black Hole To Die In was written; part of Penny’s disguise is a Mao button she takes from the dead nurse. This triggers one of the guards, who starts yelling at her, and Penny realizes, “Mao was barely in his grave, and already the factions were squaring off.” So this confirms that the manuscript was written sometime in the Fall of ’76, as Mao died in early September of that year. Penny – after killing a few technicians and a doctor – corners Hsu in the “astronaut prep” room; despite his advanced age, the old man is going up in space. He recognizes the Baroness despite the disguise. He won’t tell her why he’s insisting to go into space, as the trip will clearly kill him. Penny uses a “synthetic hypnotic” to get him to talk, and here, in the eleventh hour, Dr. Hsu is revealed as the main villain of the piece: 


Hsu has “falsified” his calculations so that the Chinese think that the black hole will merely pass through the Earth if their demands are not met; they are unaware Hsu has set it so the black hole will stay in Earth’s orbit and render everything into “nothingness.” He’s also set it so that the plan will go into effect even if the Chinese don’t launch the hole themselves; even if the nations were to give in to their demands, the mini black-hole would still descend into Earth’s orbit. And it’s going to happen “within the next twenty-four hours.” Penny strangles Hsu – he’s very casual about his death, given that drug – and then she takes a page from Connery’s Bond in You Only Live Twice by putting on Hsu’s spacesuit and passing herself off as one of the Chinese astronauts. In the chaos – caused by Alexey firing SAM rockets into the installation from afar – she mows through the crowd, slicing and dicing doctors, technicians, and other astronauts with a scalpel as she makes her way toward the rocket, which is about to launch. 

Indeed the finale is a bit preposterous – and rushed – as Penny storms across the crazed compound as the SAM rockets fall around her. Here she uses an “AR-7 survival rifle” which she’s brought along with her, sniping technicians and soldiers from afar as she climbs the 30-story scaffolding to the rocket’s cockpit. More soldiers are on the way, and MIGs are bombing Alexey’s position (“Goodbye, Alexey!” Penny thinks to herself). It’s incredibly apocalyptic, and there are only two pages left in the manuscript. At this point I started to get a sinking suspicion; there was no way Moffitt could suitably end the tale in just two pages. And folks it turns out he doesn’t; as maddening as it is to believe, A Black Hole To Die In ends on a cliffhanger! 

Penny gets into the cockpit, the only person aboard. She straps herself into the bamboo astronaut couches, turns on the AC and the oxygen supply, and cuts off mission control. She then figures out how to launch the rocket! “And then a huge gentle hand was pushing at her chest, presssing her into the couch. She lay back and willed herself to relax while the G-forces built up.” As Hsu told her, “the launch sequence had been wired in automatically,” meaning that the second and third stages of the launch sequence will go down without Penny having to do anything: “She had a free ride all the way.” 

We’re now on the last page of the manuscript, and our heroine is launching herself into space! “It was the most thrilling sensation she’d ever felt in her life.” And folks this is how A Black Hole To Die In comes to a close, as Penny’s rocket passes through the atmosphere into the zero-gravity of space: 


This is the most bonkers finale I ever could’ve expected, and I would love to know if Moffitt even intended for this manuscript to see print. (Though I have to admit it’s pretty great how he still found a way to mention Penny’s breasts one last time!) But as the handwritten and typed edits throughout attest, this wasn’t Moffitt’s first draft, so clearly it was the draft he submitted to Lyle Kenyon Engel for publication. It’s all just so crazy as to be ludicrous; Penny has absolutely no plan on how to even stop Hsu’s plot, and what will she do in space? It’s about as irrational and ridiculous as Doomsday Warrior #14. This also begs the question of how Moffitt planned to follow this installment up. Would his next volume have been entirely in space? Or would the climactic events of A Black Hole To Die In be skirted over in the intro of the next volume? What’s interesting is that no other volume ever ended on a cliffhanger, with little in the way of series continuity to link together the installments. 

As mentioned at the start of this review, there is an air of finality here – note the last line of the manuscript: “Nobody would ever see it again.” Was Moffitt referring to the series itself? Maybe he intentionally delivered this apocalyptic finale – with no resolution – knowing that it would never see print. Or maybe he wrote it in the hopes that if it were printed, reader demand to know what happened next would be sufficient to keep up sales and thus continue the series. 

Unfortunately we’ll never know. Moffitt passed away in 2014, taking any answers with him. Here’s hoping ppsantos also got to read this manuscript and was able to discuss it with Moffitt. If you are out there my friend, I’d love to hear from you! Otherwise I have to say my feelings on A Black Hole To Die In are mixed. It started strong, then got a bit sluggish, only to become incredibly crazed in the final few pages. It’s hard to judge it given the nightmarish climax, as the adventure doesn’t seem complete – particularly given that we’ll never get to see what Moffitt intended to happen next. In a way then I’m almost glad this one was never published; Death Is A Copycat would’ve made a much more suitable series finale (and indeed it was – in France!). 

One day I’m sure I’ll read this again, and I look forward to it because then I’ll just be able to read it and do a “normal” review (as part of my re-reading of the entire series; the most recent I’ve re-read is #2: Diamonds Are For Dying), and not have to worry about documenting everything. I have to say, doing these overly-comprehensive reviews of the two unpublished Baroness novels has really been exhausting! Again though I was very grateful for the chance to read them. But man I wish Moffitt had gotten to write another volume, to tie up the loose ends. 

There is of course one more unpublished Baroness novel: Robert Vardeman’s Quicktime Death, which we at least know was submtted to Engel before A Black Hole To Die In. (Vardeman has said Engel told him that “the next volume” of the series would concern a black hole.) I’ve reached out to Vardeman to see if he would mind sharing any detail on his unpublished manuscript, but haven’t heard back from him – hopefully I will, though!

Monday, June 21, 2021

Radcliff #3: Double Troube


Radcliff #3: Double Trouble, by Roosevelt Mallory
January, 1975  Holloway House

HE’S BIG, HE’S BLACK, HE’S BAD – HE’S RADCLIFF 

 -- From the back cover 

Holloway House cornered the market on action and crime novels featuring black protagonists, and Radcliff ran for four volumes right at the height of the Blaxploitation genre. This is a few volumes less than The Iceman, so either readers of the day didn’t take to it or the author, the wonderfully-named Roosevelt Mallory, moved on to other things. This is the only volume of the series I have, and judging from it Radcliff is a lot less “Blaxploitation-esque” than The Iceman, coming off for the most part like a series from Pinnacle or Pyramid or any other ‘70s imprint, one that just happens to have a black protagonist. 

So then, jive-talk is kept to a minimum, cops are referred to as “policemen,” and the sex and violence are tame – very tame when compared to the ‘70s men’s adventure average. Actually The Iceman isn’t very explicit in the sex department either, at least judging from the two volumes I’ve read. One thing both series have in common is the capitalization of “Black,” whereas “white” is never capitalized. Actually this has also crept into modern journalism (so-called); I’ve read the justification for it, but it only makes sense if you’ve been completely brainwashed. Or if you get your news from the sort of people who capitalize the “b” but not the “w,” which pretty much amounts to the same thing as being brainwashed. 

Another thing this series lacks is a strong impetus for the hero. Joe Radcliff (whose real name appears to be Jason Washington) is a ‘Nam vet who realized he was killing VC for free for Uncle Sam and decided to farm out his specialty to the highest bidder. He’s now a top “pro hit-man,” per the cover, with a talent for killing mobsters and the like. He’ll be hired by one Mafia bigwig to kill another Mafia bigwig, and Radcliff makes a fortune off it…enough to keep him in some styling threads with a few ladies at his side. So in other words, Radcliff’s only in it for the money. His customary getup includes a pair of rose-tinted glasses and he sports a stylish “Natural” (aka afro) and goattee…though he only has the Natural for the first few chapters of Double Trouble. His customary weapons are a dual pair of .38s; like most ‘70s crime fiction, revolvers are the main choice of weaponry in Radcliff

As mentioned I’m missing the previous two volumes, but it appears that Mallory has tried to inject a bit of continuity into the series. When the novel opens Radcliff is on a cruise through the Caribbean (having picked up two women along the way, “a Black and a Mexican-American”), and in fact he stays off-page for a bit too long. Rather the focus is on a pair of cops who are trying to track down a cop-killer. This would be the “double” of the title; the novel has an unsettling opening in which a ringer for Radcliff guns down an LA cop at his breakfast table, even going to the lengths of killing the man’s seven year-old daughter. Mallory doesn’t keep the kid’s death off-page, either, which makes for an unnecessarily grim opening. At any rate, the killer leaves a witness – one who will be able to relate that someone named “Radcliff” did the killing. 

A local cop named Gene Clark (not that Gene Clark) was friends with the murdered policeman and investigates the murder. The reader assumes Clark will be an important facet of the narrative, but the reader will soon be proven wrong, as Clark basically just disappears. Next we meet another cop, this one from New York, named Lt. Sam Hanson. He’s flown in from New York given his familiarity with Radcliff, having encountered him in one of the previous volumes. In the meantime the fake Radcliff has killed another couple cops. And once again made it a point for a witness to be able to peg the killer as someone named Radcliff. Of course Clark and Hanson are not aware this is an imposter, but Hanson is adamant that Radcliff is a “pro” and wouldn’t go around killing cops or innocent people…something the real Radcliff has never done. 

Meanwhile the real Radcliff is blissfully going about his cruise, but when he returns to port he’s almost blown away by a cop. This sets off the narrative drive of Double Trouble, as Radcliff scurries around Los Angeles while trying to evade the cops and figure out who is behind the frame. The vibe of Blaxploitation really is not present; Radcliff seems to have almost a professional respect for “policemen” and we know he’s never killed one. There are several parts where he has the opportunity but always goes out of his way not to. In fact he doesn’t kill very many people at all in Double Trouble. Mallory tries to inject realism into the story, with Radcliff presented as a supreme bad-ass, but not a superhero like other men’s adventure protagonists. 

Radcliff unwittingly predicts future fashion trends when he shaves off his afro – or “screwing up a masterpiece,” as he thinks to himself. With his “clean face and equally clean-shaven head” Radcliff sounds more like a ‘90s action protagonist than one from the ‘70s. Mallory was clearly familiar with Los Angeles as he brings the city to life, with Radcliff shuffling all over the place, including into Watts. Radcliff has various safehouses around the city, as well as contacts, some of whom turn out to be traitors. There’s a bit of a private eye vibe in the middle section of the novel, as Radcliff starts looking around for any local black hoodlums who have come into sudden money; his gambit is that such a person might be the ringer who was paid big bucks to impersonate Radcliff and kill a few cops and Feds. 

Truth be told this middle half is a bit hard-going, as Radcliff chases one red herring after another. Meanwhile we have a lot of business about him getting new papers and ID and etc, Mallory again striving for a crime underworld realism as Radcliff meets with various criminal contacts. Actually this whole bit has the vibe of a “black Parker” or somesuch. That said, Mallory clearly had an unwieldy wordcount (the book’s way too long at 224 pages of small print), as there’s a fair bit of padding at times; most egregious of all would be an arbitrary game of basketball Radcliff gets into with a group of kids in Watts while he’s waiting to meet the contact with his new ID paperwork. 

Mallory does inject some action into these red-herring chases, including an unexpected bit where Radcliff busts out some kung-fu to take on a guy who tries to get the drop on him. There’s also a go-nowhere bit where he finds himself talking to a stripper “with two huge breasts” named Brandy. While she disappears from the novel, Radcliff does find the time to sleep with the jilted wife of one of the suspects, but Radcliff just goes through the motions (Mallory literally writes “he went through the motions of making love to the woman”), because the lady’s clearly expecting to get lucky with him, and Mallory keeps the majority of it off-page. Speaking of which Radcliff appears to have a steady gal with whom he’s in an open relationship; a redhead beauty named Angie who only appears in the last two pages of Double Trouble. Anyway, the husband of the jilted wife Radcliff sleeps with does indeed turn out to be the fake Radcliff; while snooping through the drawers when the woman’s asleep, Radcliff finds a fake goattee and other parts of the “Radcliff” disguise. 

Radcliff can be pretty badass, though. He abducts the Mafioso who hired the fake Radcliff, torturing the mobster’s henchman to make him talk. After which Radcliff doesn’t leave any witnesses, despite his promise to take them to a hospital. Throughout we are to understand that Radcliff is supremely pissed at the situation, not concerned or worried. Mallory tries as well to give Radcliff some Jim Brown-esque dialog to convey his anger; there’s a humorous part where Radcliff tells one thug, “I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve pissed off an already highly pissed off man.” But again the drive just isn’t there, or Mallory doesn’t sufficiently convey it. Radcliff’s more angry that his name has been sullied; even here there is no burning drive to get revenge on the men who have murdered innocents so as to frame him. 

The action briefly moves to Mexico, where the fake Radcliff is hiding. Meanwhile Radcliff discovers that an infamous professional hit man is also tracking the guy: the Scorpion, who is much built up but almost perfunctorily dealt with. Also, Radcliff doesn’t even show much divine wrath when he gets hold of the imposter, basically just handcuffing the guy and getting him back to the US so he can exonerate Radcliff. I expected a few bitch-slaps at least, but for the most part Radcliff is all business. The finale lacks much spark as well, with Radcliff getting in a quick shootout with some Mafia goons, Radcliff using a .22 with dum-dum shells. 

The finale has Radcliff’s reputation restored, and he’s back with Angie. According to this insightful essay at Crime Reads, Angie would meet her own fate in the next volume, which happened to be the last. Overall Double Trouble was fairly entertaining, but came off as too blasé compared to some of the more outrageous Blaxploitation paperbacks of the era, like Dark Angel or the awesome Coffy novelization. I do love how Radcliff and Mallory are presented as one and the same on the cover; that’s Mallory’s photo (which is reproduced on the back cover) there on the Wanted poster behind Radcliff. It’s both cool and corny how Holloway House tried to make their authors come off as bad-ass as their protagonists.

Thursday, June 17, 2021

Countdown


Countdown, by Frank G. Slaughter
July, 1971  Pocket Books

Frank Slaughter was an incredibly prolific bestselling author, but he seems to be mostly forgotten today, at least by the general public, a la Harold Robbins and Burt Hirschfeld and the like. I don’t believe Slaughter was known for material as risque as either of those authors, especially Robbins, but this 1970 novel is certainly luridly melodramatic at times. In fact it’s a nearly perfect “beach read” novel and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It also seems to have done well in its day, scoring two mass market paperback editions after the original 1970 hardcover. 

I came upon Countdown in my usual manner: hunting Google for a sex and drugs-filled novel about the Space Race. No, really. This is the sort of thing I usually do. I figured there just had to be a lurid cash-in on the Space Race or the moon landing, with uber-horny astronauts and their depraved wives and drug-fueled orgies between the rocket launches and space voyages…and something set in the future, but that “future 1960s” I prefer, ie the ‘60s projected out a few decades, with the Cold War still raging and the public still fully invested in keeping America at the top of the Space Race, and maybe even some LSD too. And folks, Countdown has all of that! Even the LSD! 

While it’s certainly risque at times, I should clarify here at the start that it’s nowhere along the sleazy majesty of Robbins. Slaughter, despite his awesome last name, is slightly more reserved in that department, but then Robbins’s own novels didn’t get truly sleazy until later in the ‘70s. Actually speaking of Slaughter’s name, he was also a doctor, I mean “Doctor Slaughter:” sounds like it could be a James Bond villain or even a psychopath out of a grindhouse flick. If I’m not mistaken Slaughter was also known for Biblical themes or stories (I honestly haven’t researched him much), and fact is there’s a supporting character here who is a minister, so safe to say the sordid stuff, while present, is a bit conservative, and not of the Robbins-esque “full, upthrusting breasts” or “amyl nitrate-popping during the orgy” variety. That being said, the minister uses his role to scope out horny gals in his congregation, and the steamy stuff is slightly more explicit than what you’d find in Hirschfeld. Indeed the Pocket editors make an effort to hype up the sleaze on the back cover, calling out the “TV-monitored orgies” in this “bizarre world of driven men and restless women.” 

So while the sleaze in’t to the level I would’ve preferred (but then is it ever??), Countdown is still one heck of an entertaining read. As I wrote above, it is the epitome of a “beach read,” even, like Fire Island, comprised of various characters going to the beach themselves. Slaughter fully brings to life the fictional town of Spaceport City, built near Cape Kennedy in Florida. A bustling town of “highly trained aerospace personnel…a sun-drenched community, dominated by giant launching pads.” (That Pocket back cover copy again.) Slaughter, likely writing in 1969, extrapolates on what must’ve seemed like the obvious future the country was heading toward: the Space Race is still running strong, and Spaceport City is the center of America’s efforts in that regard. He must’ve written early in ’69, though, as there’s no mention of the moon landing. 

This brings up the question of when Countdown is set. An early reference to Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again indicates that it occurs in 1980 or thereabouts, a la Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO. (Actually that show took place in 1984, as clearly stated in two separate episodes, but given that each episode opened with a flashing “1980” in the credits you can understand why most people would be confused.) We’re told that Wolfe’s novel was published “nearly half a century ago,” and since You Can’t Go Home Again was published in 1934, nearly fifty years later would be the early 1980s, or even the late ‘70s. 

So then again, we have one of those wonderful “futures” that never happened, the 1960s projected out with the same societal setup, with “housewives” (many of whom pine for mink stoles) and the Cold War and “girls” in miniskirts, where people still smoke “breakfast cigarettes” and talk about Laugh-In and send telegrams. Even the drugs of the late ‘60s are present, to the point that you wonder why Countdown never made it onto the big screen, as it so captures the era in which it was written…I mean the Andersons could’ve produced it, with Robert Parrish directing and Derek Meddings handling the miniatures, Sylvia Anderson providing “Century 21 fashions,” and Roy Thinnes as the protagonist and Lynn Loring as one of the depraved housewives… Okay I admit, I’ve been watching Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun again. 

Well anyway, it’s 1980 or so and we meet our hero, Dr. Michael Barnes, as he’s returning home to Merritt Island, Florida; Slaughter delivers an effective opening in which Barnes witnesses the massive changes to the area he knew as a boy. What was once mostly countryside has now been developed into a bustling city, one specifically catered to the aerospace industry. “Mike,” as Slaughter will refer to him throughout, is a former astronaut himself, and this is the first he’s been in Florida “in nearly eight years.” (A phrase that is curiously repeated several times in the narrative). Mike now works in “space medicine,” meaning he researches the effects of space travel on astronauts. But as we soon learn, he himself was almost killed “nearly eight years ago” when his rocket went haywire after a launch and he plunged into the ocean. 

Mike was part of the “Hermes” program, which in this novel appears to have existed immediately after the Apollo program; characters often talk of how things “go back to the Hermes days.” Unless that is Slaughter is referring to the real-life Hermes program, which per Wikipedia was an Army project that ended in 1954. However that one seemed to be focused on unmanned rockets, and the Hermes program Mike was involved with was manned spacecraft. I think it’s just a creation of Slaughter’s, as Mike seems to be in his 30s here in the early ‘80s and thus not old enough to have taken part in any rocket launches in the 1950s. 

Slaughter though has created an entire alternate reality space program. Here in this “future” space flights have become so routine that they’ve lost the “novelty” of the Mercury and Apollo days. While Slaughter can’t be blamed for assuming his future would become a reality, given the stalling of the space industry in the ‘70s Countdown now comes off more as a sad indication of what could have been. At any rate, NASA in the novel has recently moved on to the Pegasus program, the goal of which is to put a space station in orbit. Actually it’s now the “FSA” (ie the Federal Space Administration), given that in this future the military has taken over all NASA affairs. (Just like in I Dream Of Jeannie!) Mike has come to Spaceport City to act as an unofficial investigator, sent here by a Congressman pal: there have been several Pegasus launch snafus, and the Congressman is concerned and wants Mike to figure out what’s really going on there. 

Mike’s gotten the gig because, some years before, he published in a science journal a study on the “aerospace syndrome,” with the finding that “a lot of men in high places in the rocket business divorce their wives when they’re in their fifties and marry much younger women.” The horror! But you can see already what I mean about the overall conservative tone of the novel – I mean this is actually such a “concern” that Mike’s made enemies due to the publication of the study. But more pointedly Mike was accused of foiling his Hermes launch himself and causing that crash eight years ago, to the extent that he was dubbed “space chicken.” (Which sounds like a disco song – and also disco doesn’t exist in this 1980!) The ship he crashed in was built by Taggar, the company that’s now building the spacecraft for the Pegasus program. All of which is to say that Mike’s return to the Cape isn’t a cause for celebration among several people in the aerospace industry. Regardless, his Congressman friend thinks the “aerospace syndrome” has gotten so bad that Pegasus is bound to fail, and wants Mike to give a ground report. 

An interesting note is that when Slaughter wrote this novel “TGIF,” ie “Thank God it’s Friday,” was apparently such a new term that he has to tell us what it means a few times. We’re told this concept originated in the rocket industry, but Mike himself is unaware of it and it must be explained to him a few times. Essentially at 4:30 every Friday, everyone in the aerospace industry kicks off early and hits the bars and clubs, with frequent “TGIF” parties at the houses of the VIPs. These are swinger parties; married couples are not allowed to come together. We are supposed to see this as a sign of rot in the aerospace industry, one that is ultimately leading to the Pegasus launch failures – the people in the industry are too drunk, hungover, or hooked on illicit sex to deliver quality work. 

Not that Mike has too much trouble with the “illicit sex” part. On his first day back at Spaceport City he manages to hook up with hotstuff redhead Jan Cooper, the piano-playing chanteuse of the Astronaut Inn, a now-“seedy” motel from the earliest days of Spaceport City. At the bar Mike’s invited to a TGIF party by a former astronaut pal and Jan says she’ll take him. At the party Mike sees his ex-wife Shirley (they divorced “nearly eight years ago”), who does a drunken strip-tease by the pool and nearly drowns, only to be saved by Mike – good real-world “medical stuff” from Dr. Slaughter here. After this Jan takes Mike back to his motel, where the two have a little “mangoes with brandy” and then move on to some hot lovin’. Slaughter as mentioned isn’t full-on risque, but we do get stuff like “high proud breasts” and “her body opened to his and the urgency of shared passion gripped them both once again.” 

But speaking of Burt Hirschfeld, Mike Barnes is similar to Cindy Ashe of Cindy On Fire in that he literally runs from an orgy. The title of the novel turns out to be one of them fancy double-entendres; “countdown” in the aspect of rocket launches, but “countdown” also being the name of a game played by the astronauts and aeronautical elite. Mike finds this out when an old astronaut friend turned enemy named Hal Brennan invites him over to his pad for a little get together. Mike when he enters is handed a card with a number on it, and sees a bunch of people sitting around watching a big TV. Brennan calls out bets and people throw money in a ring, then the TV comes on and Mike sees a man and a woman lying on a bed on the screen: “Both were nude and they were making love.” 

This is Countdown, a “game” invented by Brennan in which men and women are paired off by lot, randomly selected a la bingo, and then go into Brennan’s guest house to have sex while knowingly being recorded by an infrared movie camera! All for the enjoyment of the people watching in the living room, who take bets on how long it will take the couple to climax! Oh and also everyone at the party is ripped on “stingers” which are laced with amphetimines and possibly LSD. Mike learns all this in a great sequence in which he witnesses Countdown firsthand, but then he realizes the Stinger he just drank has drugged him. He rushes out of the place “before it’s too late” and hurriedly drives back to his motel before the drugs can kick in! What a loser! Especially given that he can’t make it and ends up stumbling into some lady’s house and puking his guts out all night. Slaughter’s definitely got a kinky imagination, which I appreciated, as next day Mike discovers that the number-card Hal Brennan gave him would’ve paired him up with Mike’s ex, Shirley – who happens to be Brennan’s mistress now. 

This won’t be the first orgy our hero runs from. Later on he and Jan go to the beach and stay till nightfall, and while leaving they come upon a “nightmarish” scene on the darkened beach where a bunch of teenagers are having an actual glue-sniffing party. Complete with rock music on a “battery-powered radio” and bikini’d go-go dancing, with a little orgying off to the side. Mike and Jan freak out at the spectacle and run away, worried over what they should do to stop the shenanigans. When Jan later tells Mike that she recognized the Maserati there as being owned by Paul Taggar, the CEO of the company behind the Pegasus spacecraft, Mike calls the cops about the beach party – only to find out next morning that Taggar’s teen daughter has been found dead, her body washed ashore from drowning the night before. A victim of glue-sniffing! 

So now Mike has his confirmation that the aerospace syndrome (also referred to as the “Lockheed syndrome,” which is how Mike “discovered” it – at a Lockheed plant) has run amok in Spaceport City. But Taggar and Brennan have a lockdown on the local scene, protected by their own Congressman – a political rival of Mike’s friend, and also the guy who labelled Mike “space chicken” years ago during a Congressional review of Mike’s Hermes crash. The cops are aware of all the drugs and partying and whatnot, but there’s nothing they can do about anything. Indeed Slaughter here creates this awesome alternate reality where there’s even a syndicated “Space Race gossip column” in the paper, and Mike finds himself spotlighted in the latest story, the gossiper detailing Mike’s involvement with Jan as well as some orgies, all in his first two days in Spaceport City! And all of it again a story planted by Hal Brennan, who clearly wants Mike out of Spaceport City asap. 

Slaughter shows us the effect of the aerospace syndrome among a small group of supporting characters, and admittedly a lot of this stuff could be cut. I should clarify here that so far as Mike is concerned, the syndrome only affects “rocket men,” and usually not the “flyboys.” But the engineers and general contractors and such are known for either becoming so committed to their work that they ignore their wives – and the wives start sleeping around – or they work so hard that they get rip-roaring drunk and carouse all the time to let off steam. We see all of this in play, from a “nicely curved” Southern Belle of a housewife whose engineer husband continuously ignores her, so she starts up an affair with the local reverend(!), to a contractor who goes into work hungover and hides his shoddy work, to a gay engineer who is known for borrowing money from employees to give them revivifying shots of 95% alcohol. His is the most egregious of all subplots, involving as it does a long sequence of him finding out he has syphilis and going to complex ends to handle his own treatment. 

Slaughter shows some prescience in many of the subplots. Mike discovers that there’s an almighty rush to get Pegasus off the ground and a space station in orbit. From the Space Race gossip columnist he learns the FSA’s purposes might not be altogether altruistic; it’s more than likely they have been inspired by a Soviet plan from the ‘60s to put an oribitting thermonuclear missile station in orbit, and thus Taggar is pushing to get the Pegasus spacecraft launched as soon as possible. Whoever has such a satellite could “control the world,” with the ability to drop nukes anywhere on the globe by just repositioning their location, all of which of course is a prefigure of the real-world “Star Wars” stuff in the ‘80s between the US and the USSR. There’s also a lot of political corruption afoot, as Mike further learns that the Congressman pushing for the Pegasus launch, the very same Congressman who dubbed Mike space chicken years ago, has a son who is an executive at Taggar, despite not having any experience – I mean how prescient can a 1970 book be to have a “Where’s Hunter?”-esque subplot?! 

So then, it becomes more clear to Mike that he didn’t chicken out eight years ago. The Hermes spacecraft he crashed, built by Taggar, was faulty, and now it’s coming out that the evidence was buried. Worse yet, Taggar is using the very same spacecraft in the Pegasus Program, but all faults are being covered up by the fact that the Congressman behind it has a vested interest in Taggar stock. And also Hal Brennan, Mike’s former astronaut pal, is determined to become the next governor of Florida. Slaughter masterfully puts all these threads together with fast-moving narrative, Mike learning all this stuff not via exposition but by running afoul of various people and learning what their game is. This is particularly demonstrated by Hal Brennan’s frequent attempts to blackmail Mike in some fashion, even at one point sending him a photo of a fully-nude Jan – one which was clearly taken during a Countdown party, given the glassy and drugged look in her eyes. When Mike further learns that the evidence which would’ve exonerated him was buried years ago, he’s further committed to staying in Spaceport to see things through. 

Slaughter also doles out an old-fashioned romance here, with Mike falling for Jan but things cooling off after their first-night tussles given the publication of that gossip column. (Which leads to Jan asking Mike to leave town, complete with the so stupid it’s great line, “You’ve had your orgy.”) But also Jan is in an open relationship with one of the Pegasus astronauts, leaving Mike the frustrated other man, uncertain how Jan feels for him. Not that he doesn’t have plentiful opportunities to score a whole bunch – everyone from a hotstuff reporter to Mike’s ex-wife to even that Southern Belle housewife with the “nice curves” all proposition Mike at some point in the novel. But Mike is a “Puritan” and a “prude,” and he’s a one-woman guy throughout, even telling Jan he’s in love with her before the novel’s halfway through. As I say, this is the big difference from a Robbins or even Hirschfeld novel – Mike would be much more amoral in the hands of either of those writers. 

The final third loses its way a bit with those aforementioned subplots taking center stage, showing how the aerospace syndrome can lead to disaster through negligence at work. Slaughter does a good job of incorporating these subplots into the climax, which displays yet more prescience in its prediction of the Challenger disaster, but some of the stuff just gets in the way of what had been a very entertaining novel. For example, the hazards of glue-sniffing return when a young man who now has jaundice from his escapades wants to crack the lid open on Spaceport City’s juvenile drug problem, and Mike helps him out. There’s also a lot of “medical” stuff, with Mike driving around and checking on various patients. And also Mike himself comes off like a dewy-eyed chump here, having realized he’s in love with Jan almost ridiculously fast – imploring her with lines like, “Darling, why won’t you marry me?” and such. What makes it even more humorous is Jan’s increasingly distant nature toward him. And there’s a lot of stuff about him just going to eat various meals or glumly watching TV alone – even turning off Star Trek at one point because space stravel seems so easy on the show! 

Slaughter also incorporates a paranoid thriller vibe in these final pages, as Mike learns that he’s so dangerous to the Pegasus launch that someone’s willing to kill him. We get a prefigure of the Moonraker film where he almost buys it in a centrifuge, lured there and trapped inside as it begins to spin to a force that would pulp him. It’s a tense scene, but somewhat undermined by Slaughter’s medical world know-how; rather than focus on the danger and the terror, we’re informed how Mike’s body reacts to the increasing gravity and what will happen to his arteries and heart and etc. In other words it just comes off more “cold” than it should. Also this conspiracy subplot is humorously rushed through in the finale, in which Slaughter loops all his threads: the Pegasus launch, the various aerospace syndrome subplots, the crazy preacher, the conspiracy to kill Mike, and even Mike’s love for Jan. It’s so busy that the revelation of who was trying to kill Mike almost comes off as an afterthought. 

To be sure, don’t go into Countdown expecting a novel of space travel or astronauts in orbit and such. It’s more of a torrid melodrama along the lines of Hirschfeld and the other mainstream authors of the day, one that just happens to be set in the space industry. Slaughter’s clearly done his homework and brings to life the rigors and hazards of this industry very well. But really it’s more about the buildup to a spacelaunch, rather than the spacelaunch itself. In this regard the novel might not be as recommended to sci-fi readers, but definitely recommended to fans of this era’s “Big Sexy” fiction. I enjoyed it a lot, with the caveat that I found the final third a bit hard-going and the climax a bit underwhelming. 

Here’s the cover of the 1976 Pocket edition, which misleadingly makes Countdown look like a romance novel!

Monday, June 14, 2021

Stryker #4: Deadly Alliance


Stryker #4: Deadly Alliance, by William Crawford
July, 1975  Pinnacle Books

The cover of this final volume of Stryker promises a Blaxploitation spin on the series, but as it turns out Deadly Alliance is of a piece with the other volumes, and William Crawford’s work in general: an unlikable prick protagonist blitzes his way through a string of low-life underworld types, mercilessly beating unarmed men and women and occasionally shooting a few of them while thinking to himself how cops “need to be respected,” before ultimately being captured and tortured himself. And by novel’s end someone will shit their pants. 

While the previous volume was a streamlined affair, so far as Crawford’s work goes – following a linear plot from beginning to end with no digressive rundowns of various one-off characters – this one returns to the Crawford norm, wasting pages with egregious backstory and digressions. It’s little wonder Deadly Alliance was the last volume of Stryker. I would imagine readers of the day just couldn’t connect with it, as Crawford’s style makes for a hard read. And Stryker is particularly unlikable this time. I mean a protagonist can be lovably unlikable, like Ryker, or even lovably unhinged, like Magellan, but Stryker’s just a prick here, with no redeeming qualities to make the reader root for him. 

Stryker’s driven nature is due to the murder of Paul Stalking Deer, a guy who was “more than a brother” to Stryker and served with him in the war, worked on the Stryker family ranch, and whatnot. This murder occurs toward the beginning of Deadly Alliance; the actual opening of the novel has Stryker shaving off his moustache (which he grew as a disguise in the first volume) and “hating himself” due to the crazed violence of his life. After this Stryker meets with Boyd Frazier, a journalist who claims he can get Stryker exonerated and all the charges on him dropped. Meanwhile Stryker is content to live on his ranch here in New Mexico; one wonders if he’s in a pinochle club with fellow New Mexico ranch owner Dakota

Oh and believe it or not, but for once we actually have a few lines of dialog from Stryker’s daughter, who as we’ll recall was blinded in the first volume. She’s basically being raised by Stryker’s mother, who has taught the little girl to speak in Gaelic. However this will be it for that subplot; once Stryker hears of Paul Stalking Deer’s murder, in “the largest city in New Mexico,” Stryker heads off on the vengeance trail. Thankfully the “flying fiction” is nonexistent this time, and for the most part Deadly Alliance is a violent revenge thriller that moves in a linear line. It’s just that I personally couldn’t have cared less about the guy seeking the revenge. 

But then that linear plot line only follows Stryker’s material. We also have too-long cutaways to Boyd Frazier and other supporting characters, complete with time-wasting backgrounds on their lives. A hallmark of Crawford’s – let’s recall how the first volume even told us how Stryker’s friggin’ grandparents met – and a sad return to form after the previous volume. At any rate Stryker heads into that New Mexico city and tracks the leads on who murdered his friend. While the cover calls out the “black Mafia,” ultimately the villains of Deadly Alliance are a group of young left-wing radicals, a la SDS and the Weathermen, a group that happens to be made up of various races. However early on Stryker gets word that a black Mafia might’ve been involved, only to hear from another character that the whole thing is a shuck, a cover story for the real group. 

There are a lot of tiebacks to the first volume, with Stryker hitting some of the same informants and visiting the same places in his quest for info. We get our first indication of the type of novel we’ll be reading when Stryker gets an informant in his car and proceeds to beat him unmerciful, even slapping his ear to rupture his eardrum. It’s definitely hardcore and all, but it lacks the similar “revenge at all costs” vibe of superior revenge yarns like Bronson: Blind Rage. This again comes down to Stryker. There’s just something irritating about him; I know the intention is to convey he’s a supreme badass, but at the same time he just comes off like a creep and you root for the bad guys. His occasional sermons are also off-putting. 

And your last name wouldn’t have to be “Freud” to detect just a wee little bit of homoeroticsm in Crawford’s prose. Stryker constantly insults his male prey with putdowns involving the derriere – everyone’s “buttface” or “assface” or “asshole” or even “dumbutt.” Also factor in how Stryker’s threats also usually refer to butts: “burn your ass” and etc. And Crawford still does that mega-strange thing of his where “hard” curse words appear in the narrative but are bowdlerized in the dialog; ie “Motherf– ” and “C–,” whereas both words are clearly stated in the narrative. Coupled with the curious obsession with male asses – and the fact that Stryker goes ladyless this time – this makes everything rather strange to say the least. The fact that Crawford clearly wasn’t even aware of how all this comes off makes it even more humorous. But then, maybe he was; in Deadly Alliance Crawford shows a sudden familiarity with pop culture, referring to movies and TV shows quite often. At one point Stryker watches “the great television series Star Trek,” and later on Crawford even mentions Dennis Hopper. 

Well anyway, Stryker goes around town and beats up various men and women. A lot of it is repetitious from every other Crawford novel I’ve reviewed here. Stryker just bashes heads for info, usually not using his own head. There’s a part where he goes into a bar run by a black guy he beat up in prison, and Styrker realizes too late he’s unarmed and outnumbered. Then someone puts a gun to Stryker’s back, but our hero delivers a merciless beatdown despite the odds. He’ll learn this guy, a young black man, was hired to kill him. Cue another brutal torture sequence as Stryker drives the guy out into the countryside and beats him to pulp to find out who hired him. But Stryker has a soft side, folks; he feels bad for the kid and gives him some money and tells him to get the hell out of New Mexico! 

Given the nature of the villains this time, the novel is filled with sermons against the left, particularly the radical movement – “It wasn’t what the world was coming to, but the kind of people now living in the world.” The left-wing terrorists Stryker faces are a hate-filled lot of drug-using freaks, led by a black man who is stoned out of his gourd most of the time (ie, “He blasted hash for breakfast,” and etc) and who just fumbles through the usual speeches to his mindless but dangerous lackeys. There are of course many parallels to today throughout this sequence, with the caveat that Crawford was writing in a more rational world: the Federal agencies, we know from Stryker’s various asides, are staffed with lawmen just itching to get their hands on these left-wing radicals. 

In addition to the radical movement, the terrorists are also heavily into heroin. Stryker gets wind of this soon enough, following the drug pipeline until it takes him to a pair of girls, one white and one black, who are users. Stryker beats the living shit out of both of them in a sequence that was probably unsettling in ’74, let alone today. The white girl is fat and we get lots of stuff about her being so unattractive to begin with, let alone her heroin addiction and how it makes her willing to do anything. But she has info on the radicals and she’s the one Stryker really sets in on – she’s also the character who shits herself this time, right in Stryker’s car. Luckily this happens off-page, but we’re to understand that, due to her cold turkey heroin withdrawal, the girl barfs and shits all over the interior of Stryker’s car…and just as he’s hosing it down he’s taken captive himself by the very radicals he seeks. 

They call themselves the National Alliance of Liberationists and ostensibly they’re led by Lynlee McGuire, the so-called “Fied Marshall,” but really it’s an American Indian girl named Carolina who runs the show. A “Reservation cousin” of Paul Stalking Deer, she was sent to college thanks to money Stryker’s mom raised for her, but she pays this back with hatred and resentment, having been fed endless propaganda about America’s racism and whatnot. Honestly the whole thing is dispiritedly tiresome in our current era, but at least Crawford pokes holes in their propaganda – Stryker’s comments in particular starting on page 156 are basically an indictment of what is now referred to as “systemic racism,” Stryker arguing that blanket accusations against an entire society make for an easy copout for one’s own individual shortcomings. 

Carolina is especially loathsome and there’s none of the “sexy villainess” stuff I generally demand in my pulp. She’s just a stone cold whackjob and so committed to her radicalism that she’s chomping at the bit to kill Stryker. Oh and it develops that they’ve targeted him because they want Stryker’s mom to sell her ranch so they can use the money for the movement or somesuch. The plan is to abduct Stryker and get his mom to pay for his ransom via selling the ranch. Stryker goes along with it, tied up and slapped around, as usually happens to every Crawford protagonist is in the final pages. But he himself is determined to kill Carolina – and gets his opportunity when he’s condemned to death after a kangaroo trial with the Field Marshall presiding. 

But the crazy thing is, Crawford jumps to the epilogue just as Stryker has his chance to fight back. The struggle with Carolina is tense and brutal, and after which Stryker realizes he’s surrounded by several armed radicals. Crawford for whatever reason blows through all this, serving up an anticlimactic finale of Stryker blasting away with an AR-15 and showing these punks what terror’s all about. That said, there’s a great bit where the Field Marshall trots in, using a nude girl as a human shield, and Stryker shoots her in the thigh to get her out of the way! But after this it’s a quick flash-forward to after the melee, and Stryker’s safe at home back at the ranch. 

While Deadly Alliance was the last volume, Crawford clearly had another installment in mind: the novel ends with Frazier convincing Styrker to head into New York City and bust up some dirty cops. Stryker is definitely interested, but obviously readers weren’t, as there were no further volumes. It seems at this point Crawford’s tenure with Pinnacle came to an end, even though at one point he was so prolific for the publisher that they ran full-page ads for his novels. After this he was back to penning pseudonymous novels for book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. Moral of the story: If you want a long-running action series, at least make your protagonist somewhat likable.

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Adrano For Hire #3: The Swiss Shot


Adrano For Hire #3: The Swiss Shot, by Michael Bradley
April, 1974  Warner Books

The third volume of Adrano For Hire picks up a month after the previous volume; Johnny Adrano is still in the jungles of Mexico, and he’s in a bad way, suffering from dissentery and barely able to move. We learn he’s been staying here at the behest of his local friends, as this might be the one place in the world where the Mafia won’t be able to find him; as we’ll recall, there’s a contract out on Johnny from his actions in the first volume, and a psycho capo named Rizzo in particular wants him dead. 

Where the previous installments have been ensemble pieces along the lines of Mafia: Operation, The Swiss Shot keeps Adrano in center stage a little more than previously. However there are many sequences that cut away to other characters. More importantly though, if I didn’t know “Michael Bradley” was a pseudonym for Gary Blumberg, I’d figure with this volume that it was Adam Diment. There are sections of this novel that could’ve come right out of the Philip McAlpine novels (only in third-person, not first), with that same cynical vibe and all-knowing, all-annoying protagonist. Blumberg even works in a total Diment-ism with Adrano frequently musing over how he’s now “old,” given that the novel opens on his thirtieth birthday. 

The schtick of this series is that Adrano is a lone wolf in the Mafia who uses his gift for disguise and languages to pull cons and capers in the criminal world. At least that seems to be the schtick. But in this one Adrano falls on his face time after time; he spends the majority of the narrative being traded from one captor to another, and is knocked out so many times that you figure the dude’s going to have a permanent concussion. What makes this all the more amusing is that his arrogance remains unchecked. But honestly he is incredibly ineffectual in this one. The “disguise” angle is lost, as is the “caper” angle, and Adrano’s such a chump on the action front that he’s constantly dropping whatever gun he gets his hand on, or having a gun taken from him. That being said, he does kill one guy just by hitting him hard with his fist. 

We get our first indication of our protagonist’s buffoonery when he finally decides to leave the hovel he’s been living in, deep in the jungle, and ventures to Mexico City…where he’s promptly captured by a pair of mobsters who work for Rizzo. This after Blumberg has also given us an indication of the time-wasting he’ll treat us to throughout the novel; Adrano’s just sitting there, as ever mulling over his “old age” (as I say a recurring gimmick that gets real old real quick), and a pretty local chick with perfect English comes over, starts talking to him…then invites herself up to his room so she can change into her bikini and go swimming with him! She leaves to get her bikini and then the mobsters show up, and she’s never mentioned again, nor even the possibility that she was like a honey trap for the two mobsters. 

But at any rate this will be just the first of several times in which Adrano is whisked away by a couple of armed thugs. Meanwhile as mentioned the cutovers to other characters aren’t as excessive this time, but they’re still there. A la previous volumes there’s a lot of treachery afoot in the mob world: so there’s “old fart” Don Gaspar Rinaldi, Rizzo’s boss, but Rizzo wants the old man out of the way, and to this end has cooked up a scheme with Gaspar’s nutcase son, Michael. The belabored plan has it that Gaspar, in Geneva to visit a clinic for various ailments, is kidnapped and held in the clinic, with his doctor being forced to inject Gaspar with rabies if he doesn’t hand over the reigns of his empire to Michael by a certain date. However Michael and Rizzo are also plotting against one another, each of them planning to get that power for themselves. 

The plotting gets more complex; Adrano finds himself with a new pair of abductors, these ones Corsicans. This time he’s knocked out (again) and put on a plane, where he’s knocked out via drugs frequently. When he comes to he finds himself in the presence of Jean Paoli, the heroin kingpin from the first volume who lives in Marseilles and became uneasy allies with Adrano. Paoli explains that Gaspar Rinaldi is crucial for his network to succeed, thus Adrano is ordered to go rescue him from that clinic. After a little arm-pulling Adrano agrees, asking for papers and a gun. But don’t worry, friends, ultimately he won’t even use either of them, as the dude blunders through the novel and makes one mistake after another, to the point that it’s no great shock why there was only one more volume after this one. 

Blumberg does a pretty good job of bringing the Swiss locale to life, but truth be told the book was a little hard-going for me and I had to work to drum up any enthusiasm for it. This time the “sub-Adam Diment” stuff was the problem; there’s a part where Adrano visits an actual psychedelic club in Switzerland, but instead of bringing the place to life Blumberg has Adrano sneering over how it’s “ten years out of date.” This entire sequence could’ve come out of any of the Philip McAlpine novels, particularly when some nameless local girl appears at Adrano’s table and starts coming on to him. Blumberg, a la Diment, doesn’t even bother to tell us what she looks like, let alone exploit her any, and Adrano for his part refers to her as a “female-person,” which is such jaded hipsterism bullshit that I almost wished I could transport myself into the book and punch him. Luckily the sex scene isn’t a fade to black (I mean why do writers fade to black when it comes to what surely must be the most fun scenes to write??), but the girl turns out to be a honey trap, and Adrano, believe it or not, is captured again! 

This time Adrano’s forced to dig his own grave while the two captors watch him with guns; more Diment-isms as Adrano chafes at the affrontery of this and goes bashing with his shovel. Somehow Adrano manages to escape and find Gaspar Rinaldi, which leads to a bit where he’s almost captured yet again. But the rabies injection factors into the climax, being used on an unexpected character in the novel’s most memorable moment. For Blumberg here is not writing an action-centric saga by any means; Adrano, when he even has a gun, only occasionally shoots anyone, and the violence is not exaggerated at all. But his sendoff of a villain here is pretty memorable, given that a bullet to the head is considered mercy in comparison to the rabies injection. 

The finale of The Swiss Shot sees Adrano fifty thousand bucks richer, as reward for successfully completing the job, and last we see of him he’s planning to stay in Jean Paoli’s opulent pad and read the man’s original editions of Machiavelli. In the original Italian. Let’s not forget, Adrano is a genius and all. Not that you’d know it from the way he handles himself in any of these books. As mentioned, there was one more volume of the series to go, and I will assume it will turn out to be as lackluster as the first three.

Monday, June 7, 2021

The Girl In The Trunk


The Girl In The Trunk, by Bruce Cassiday
July, 1973  Ace Books

I have this lame tradition I’ve started over the years: each summer I read a grimy ‘70s crime novel – ie, Bronson: Blind RageDeath ListFramed, and etc. And now The Girl In The Trunk, which presents itself as being right up there (or down there) with the rest of them. Ironically I picked this one up several years ago but never read it, and over these past few years when I’ve been searching high and low for some new sleazy ‘70s crime kick, the book’s been sitting there neglected in a box. 

I should’ve known already that the book might have what I wanted: I mean for one thing there’s the striking (and uncredited) cover art, which is enough to raise one’s hackles. Then there’s the back cover copy, which is like Gannon or Stryker in how it tries to warn off potential readers, given the violent nature of its protagonist: “His fellow detectives on the Honolulu force didn’t like Egan. They couldn’t stomach his sick brutality, the unholy glee with which he trapped and roughed-up mugging suspects, and other victims for his sadistic fists.” So yes, we’re certainly in that grimy ‘70s crime paperback sweet spot, only one with an unusual setting: whereas most these types of books take place in New York or somewhere equally grimy, The Girl In The Trunk is set in sunny Honolulu. 

The novel also occurs over the course of a single day, which is another difference from the average crime paperback of the day. Author Bruce Cassiday keeps the momentum moving over the 200+ pages of the narrative, even skillfully working in the mounting tension of a tsunami that’s headed for Hawaii. The book opens with an 8.9 earthquake in Chile, and periodically the narrative cuts over to the officials monitoring the situation and the tsunamis that have arisen in its wake, with one of them bearing directly for Honolulu. And that’s another difference: The Girl In The Trunk, despite being packaged as a lone wolf cop thriller, is actually more of an ensemble piece, focused on a wide range of characters. This makes the book similar to some of the crime bestsellers of the day, a la The Anderson Tapes and The Taking Of Pelham 123

Lt. Jim Egan, a tough cop in his 40s, gets the back cover credit, but really he’s just one character of many: The Girl In The Trunk is more of a police procedural mixed with a disaster story than the gory yarn promised by the cover art and back cover copy. Egan’s story has it that his wife Berenice was murdered by muggers years before, and now Egan, a “freelance” agent for the Criminal Investigations Department, hunts down muggers to even the score. We meet him in this regard, coming out of a bar at 2:55AM on August 7th and being waylaid by a pair of muggers who think he’s a hapless tourist. But then when their knives come out Egan swoops into action, beating them merciless with his fists and feet. His reputation so precedes him that even the muggers are aware who he is, as are the disgusted cops who come by to round up the mauled muggers. Unlike Gannon or Bronson, Egan is still a cop, thus we learn he’s yet to actually kill any of his victims. 

Then there’s Toshi Yonomuro, 51 year-old chief of CID and Egan’s boss; a Hawaiian-born Japanese with an artificial left cheek that was grafted on after some Germans blew the real one off during WWII. Toshi has his share of the narratiev, as do his wife Blossom and their daughter, Lehua, a college-aged “radical” who has big plans for the rally that night, and claims her dad’s warnings of an impending tsunami are just typical “bourgeois fear” to keep the subversives confused. Both of these characters will carry a good bit of the plot, as does another officer, Ki, a 26 year-old who is “the most cerebral” guy on Toshi’s force and ultimately works the titular case with Egan. 

So just to reiterate, the sadistic tale promised by the cover and copy is only partly delivered on; we meet Egan while beating up some muggers, as mentioned, but he kills neither. We learn he’s now beaten 16 muggers since his wife was killed by one, but this backstory isn’t much elaborated on other than to show that Egan is pretty damn nuts. A few times in the story he will start seeing his dead wife’s face and get dizzy and consumed with violent anger. But other than that he’s just a dick, making a lot of racist comments about Hawaiians and “old Hawaii;” Egan came here before WWII, and often goes on how Hawaii was so much better before it became a state – something with which Toshi also agrees. 

For that’s another layer of the busy story: the various tiers of what is and isn’t a Hawaiian. Ie the native Hawaiians, those with Japanese heritage, those with Caucasian heritage, and those that are mixtures of the above. Then there are also lineages of whether one is “native born Japanese-Hawaiian” or whatnot. But as one of the characters muses, none of it really matters. Cassiday clearly was familiar with Hawaii and really brings the locale to life, as well as the festering racial hostilities and resentments. He even graces the narrative with some smatterings of Japanese, most of which reads correctly (fun fact: I studied Japanese in college and spent a semester in Tokyo). But this whole “race” angle is just one of the many subplots: police procedural, impending disaster, escaped convict, and even radical politics. 

The latter element is how Toshi’s daughter plays into the narrative: she’s been dating Danny, the leader of the Young People’s Family, a group of college-age radicals who want to split off from the Mainland and restore the “real” Hawaii. Here we get a peek into the radical movement mindset of the day, as well as the interesting revelation that at this point the hippies now called themselves “Earth people,” or at least so is Toshi’s belief. So Cassiday even works in a generational divide layer to the novel. He also displays how, no matter their age or race, radicals are a despicable lot: Lehua happens to be pregnant, and when she happily reveals this to Danny he responds that he’ll be glad to raise the kid, but he will be a “bastard,” because “the movement demands purity,” thus Danny can only marry a native Hawaiian. Of course this doesn’t go over very well with Lehua. 

As mentioned The Girl In The Trunk takes place over a single day, August 7 (year unstated), so there isn’t any opportunity for seeing how big revelations play out over time. It’s actually curious that Cassiday went for this “single day” setup, as there was plenty of room for him to flesh out the story more, particularly given the many plots. As it is, he injects a mounting tension with frequent cutaways to various one-off characters as they track the impending tsunami and put out the appropriate alerts. Interestingly one of these one-off characters happens to be “the second announcer” at a “hard rock FM station,” but Cassiday buzzkills any opportunity for fun here with the comment that the DJ is “over thirty” and thus “secretly hates hard rock!” 

So the vengeful cop leaving a trail of mauled corpses in his wake is a story that never happens in The Girl In The Trunk. Instead the main storyline has to do with the embezzlement of half a million dollars from a firm called Dill and Fox; the suspected party was a comptroller named Ames, and Egan and Ki will spend the rest of the novel hunting for him. One subplot, gradually minimized due to the impending threat of the tsunami, is that Toshi is concerned Egan’s mugger-maulings will make it into the news, the force of course not needing the bad press, but he still puts Egan on this Dill and Fox case because he’s “a good detective.” 

One questions Toshi’s opinion when Egan – who remember just beat up two muggers a few hours ago – is sent to the home of Ames, where Egan interviews the man’s attractive, middle-aged wife…and gawks over how she’s a ringer for Berenice, his dead wife. Mrs. Ames turns out to be rather poised for someone whose husband apparently just absconded with half a million bucks, and she trades some memorable barbs with Egan. Meanwhile Ki and even Toshi meet with various firm reps, lending the novel much more of a procedural tone than what the reader might’ve been expecting; in fact I wonder if Ace retitled and repackaged Cassiday’s novel to be more in-line with the violent thrillers then populating the bookstore shelves (or spinner racks). 

Indeed, the titular “girl in the trunk” is discovered early on in the novel, by a beach bum who comes upon a Datsun in the Honolulu Air Port parking lot, some stray dog trying to get into the trunk. Inside the bum sees a dead blonde, completely nude, but he rushes off (the dog tagging along), not willing to call in the discovery. Later though it’s found and Toshi and team go out to the airport while the ME examines; Cassiday furthers the procedural tone with a lot of real-world detail on corpse “lividity” and etc. Here we learn that the dead blonde was the mistress of Ames, the runaway comptroller. In the course of their investigation (ie, over the next few hours), the detectives will learn that Ames’s boss at the firm was also involved in an affair…with Mrs. Ames. 

Along the way we also have repercussions from Egan’s opening mugger-mauling; Toshi interrogates the two “victims,” a bit surprised that one of them seems so blasé about his upcoming jail time. Later (ie just a few hours later) the mugger escapes while being transported to jail, lending the novel yet another tangent: the fugitive on the run. This guy runs roughshod through Honolulu, taking advantage of the growing paranoia over the upcoming tsunami – which has now been determined to make landfall by evening. Cassiday throws around all kinds of curveballs here, with the escaping mugger running into various characters from the narrative. He also doles out a surprise reveal that I won’t spoil on who the mugger really is. 

Action is infrequent; other than the opening bit with Egan, we have a tussle or two, and a gory death when the mugger makes his escape during the transport. For a guy presented as so brutal, Egan doesn’t fare very well; there are two parts where his attacker nearly gets the better of him. That said, at one point he gets his hands on a guy and is about to kill him – again flashing on his dead wife’s face – and is only stopped by Ki. But the cops are very skittish about pulling their guns and shooting, even though Egan likes to constantly threaten people he’s about to. Again, it’s all more of a “realistic” procedural than a violent actioner. 

Cassiday loops all the threads in the finale, which of course sees the tsunami making landfall just as our heroes square away the case and apprehend the escaped mugger. Cassiday even works in Lehua’s plight; one of the subplots is her concern over telling her dad she’s pregnant. Our author manages to give this subplot a happy ending, but again we don’t know how much it will pan out, given that the story occurs over a single day. Cassiday’s focus is more on displaying the various dynamics of Honolulu and its people, and in this regard he really brings the locale to life. 

I wouldn’t say The Girl In The Trunk is a sleazy crime yarn along the lines of the others I’ve reviewed here, though you may be fooled into thinking it is by the cover. If anything it proves that Cassiday was a virtual chameleon so far as his writing goes, so prolific that he wrote everything from historical sagas (The Phoenician, which I got years ago but still haven’t read) to the final installments of Mace.

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Men’s Adventure Quarterly #1

 
Mens Adventure Quarterly #1, edited by Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, and Paul Bishop
January, 2021  Subtropic Productions

All fans of mens adventure magazines owe a debt of gratitude to Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham, who have done what I thought no one else would do: brought men’s adventure magazines back into print for the modern day. Mens Adventure Quarterly #1 reprints vintage men’s mag stories and art, with a new theme each issue. Under the “Men’s Adventure Library” Bob and Wyatt Doyle have published several books over the past few years, but Men’s Adventure Quarterly is special because it actually comes off like a vintage men’s mag – only a lot slicker and more professionally put together, and without that strange stink that most old men’s mags have! 

For make no mistake, Men’s Adventure Quarterly #1 is a work of art. The presentation is flawless, with eye-popping reproduction of cover art and a layout more in-tune with today’s readers – no dual columns of blurry typescript copy here. Also, Bob and Bill do something that the old men’s magazine editors apparently never thought to do: they group each issue around a theme. So as you can see, this first issue is devoted to Westerns. I should admit right at the start that I am not and have never been an avid fan of Westerns – I think there was a brief tangent as a preteen in the ‘80s that I was into Spaghetti Westerns and mabye read a Longarm or two – but regardless I really enjoyed all the stories here. 

I’ve collected about 50 or so men’s adventure mags over the years, but the majority of them feature Nazi She-Devils (here’s hoping that will be the theme of an upcoming issue!!) or other WWII stories. I’d never read any Western men’s mag stories, nor gone out of my way to collect any of them. What I found interesting is that they turn out to be of a piece with the other men’s mag stories of the era: most all of them open with the incident depicted on the cover or the story frontispiece, then flash back to show how the characters got to this moment, and then quickly wrap up by returning to that opening incident. Honestly I think there was like a DeVry school for men’s mag writers; practically every single story I’ve ever read follows this same template. 

Another nice thing the editors do here is provide an intro for each story, which I much appreciated; I’m going to assume Bob wrote most of them, as they read very much like his posts over at his blog. In each case we get an overview of the author, the artist, and maybe some background context on the story – even photos of the real-life personalities (for the stories that don’t feature completely fictional characters). As I say, the publication is clearly a labor of love. The three editors (Paul Bishop serves as guest editor this issue) did a good job of selecting the tales; there’s a fair bit of variety, and all of them are memorable. They also selected from a wide range of men’s mags, from higher-quality lines like Male and more sweaty ones like Man’s Life. However none of the stories are very long; there are no “true book bonus”-type novellas here along the lines of the type collected in vintage anthologies like Our Secret War Against Red China or Women With Guns

The first story is “The Old Shell Game,” by John Concannon, and it’s from the February 1953 issue of Male. The editorial intro says that this one’s unique in that it offers a “female empowerment” storyline, what with it’s buckskin-garbed blonde beauty of a gunslinger. But man, as it turns out, “female empowerment” is offered a resounding slap to the face by story’s end. The story is also unique in that it’s narrated by a guy in his sixties, one who even looks upon the buckskin beauty as a daughter or somesuch; what I mean to say is, the story doesn’t burn with that horny fire typical of men’s mag yarns. 

So anyway, the narrator (whose name is Bill, though we don’t learn that until the final few paragraphs) tells us how he was sitting in a saloon one day and this gorgeous blonde gunslinger in buckskin strutted in; she’s referred to throughout as “Buckskin,” and as with Bill it isn’t even until the final paragraphs that we learn her real name. Anyway the intro is memorable; she’s here looking for a certain scumbag, obviously intent to blow him away with her six-gun. But instead she – and the story – gets taken in an entirely different direction as Buckskin is almost suckered in the titular shell game, courtesy a thug named Frenchie. Once all that’s sorted out, narrator Bill implores Buckskin to spend the night in town, where she later informs him she’s searching for the man who killed her husband. Then Bill tells us in a humorously hasty conclusion that he’s able to talk her out of her blood vendetta! 

“Madams Of The Old West” is by Richard Carter and Glen Kittler and from the July 1955 Male. This is one of the stories that’s more nonfiction than fiction; the editors include a very insightful intro with real-world background info as well as photos of some of the madams discussed in the story. And of course they look a whole lot different than the smokin’ hot babes depicted in the story’s illustrations! Here we learn about such infamous Old West brothel owners as Poker Alice and the like, the authors doling out their histories and some of their more notorious affairs. Interesting, but too tame given the subject matter. 

“Trigger-Happy Marshall” is by Dean W. Ballenger and from the November 1956 issue of Stag. A big thanks to the editors for the shoutout they gave my review of Gannon #1! Their discussion of Ballenger was much welcomed, particularly their revelation that he wrote a countless number of men’s mag stories. Years ago I reviewed some of them. In particular I’d love to read the Nazi She-Devil yarn from ’63 that’s briefly excerpted in the intro – again, here’s hoping that will be a forthcoming MAQ theme. The editors state that “Trigger-Happy Marshall” isn’t as extreme as Gannon, but I thought it was a definite indication of the brutal vibe of that later series, given that the titular marshall is a psychopath who enjoys killing. Not to mention the dark humor that runs throughout. 

Sam Krell is that marshall, a short-statured lawman in Colorado who is known for his brutality. We’re told of how he has often killed crooks in cold blood – even gunned down newsmen who published critical stories of him – but the townspeople look away given how he keeps the place safe. But Krell has other goals: when a gang escapes with bank loot, Krell hunts them down, kills their leader…and takes over the gang. Here we’re told of the various sadistic campaigns they unleashed, including even brutal fights against Indians. Krell is a definite bastard; he would hire buddies to join his gang, and as a test of loyalty to be accepted one buddy would have to kill the other. After a few years of success Krell retires to a large cattle ranch, but when it’s destroyed by marauding Indians he returns to the town he started off in…and asks for his job as marshall back! I really enjoyed this one, and it had more action and violence than the typical men’s mag yarn – but not much in the way of sex. Indeed, Krell seems curiously disinterested in women, and his one depicted incident with a hooker is very odd indeed. 

“The Gunman Who Killed The Critics” is by Richard Gehman and from the February 1959 issue of Argosy. This one’s just straight-up reporting and is focused on the TV show Gunsmoke. Which I’ve never watched, thus I must admit I glossed over this story, given my lack of interest in the subject matter. 

“The Cowboy And The Dance Hall Floozy” by Bill Houseman is more along the lines of what I’m interested in; it’s from the April 1959 issue of Untamed. Here we have a strange revenge story: Crazylegs Moosberg, a half-Indian outlaw, is the last survivor of a gang and escapes to a small town in Colorado until the heat wears off. He comes into a saloon, one he finds deserted save for an attractive woman at the card table. She pulls a gun on him, saying she always knew he’d return. Here we have a strange flashback in which Crazylegs abruptly remembers how he got drunk in this very saloon, a year before, and murdered the girl’s husband after a game of cards. Something he’d plumb just forgotten about until this moment! The girl takes her revenge after an overlong but tense game of poker. 

“Say ‘No” To Laurie Lee…And Wish You Were Dead” is by Lou Cameron and from the September 1959 issue of All Man. This was my favorite in the issue; Cameron’s story is like a proto-Spaghetti Western with its tough nature and oddball assortment of characters. It’s also one I wish had been expanded into paperback length. I’d definitely read it! A Texas Ranger named Ben Harvey rides into a ghost town in Utah; he’s been tracking an outlaw, only to find him strung up with several others overtop a dry riverbed. Cameron effectively captures the eerie setting of the hanged corpses, their skin stretched taut by the desert sun. From here the story gets weirder; Harvey encounters an “idiot” girl in a “potato sack” dress that barely hides her shapely figure; she warns him to get out of town. But it’s too late, as Harvey meets the “law” of the town, a crazy old man who has discovered uranium and decided to stay here, the only other occupants being a slim gunfighter named Lee and two disfigured women: one with a hunchback and one with a scarred face. 

The old man, goaded on by Lee, accuses Harvey of stealing a horse and throws him in jail, for a “trial” the following morning. That night in his cell Harvey is visited by a mysterious woman in the darkness who begs, “Want me, cowboy.” After some undescribed all-night shenanigans, the mysterious girl takes off…and later Harvey is visited by another girl looking for love: Zenobia, the “idiot” with the killer bod. (Or as Cameron puts it, “The lovely young creature was obviously a hopeless idiot.”) More off-page fireworks ensue. Harvey manages to get out of the jail before his kangaroo court can commence, and the story climaxes with the memorable image of Harvey squaring off against a female gunfighter – one who is naked save for her pistol holster. Cameron skillfully moves the story along; it only runs a few pages but definitely makes an impression, and I can’t believe I’ve done reviews here for 11 years now and have yet to review a book by Lou Cameron! 

“Terror Of The All Girl Posse” is by Thomas Halloran (possibly a house name, per the intro) and from the January 1960 issue of Man’s Life. I’d seen the cover of this one before, with the cleavage-baring beauties rounding up some guy while another shapely female hangs in the foreground. And as ever the story opens depicting this very scene; a killer named Rivers has been captured by some “lovely executioners,” ie the female posse of the title. They’ve already killed Rivers’s woman, Maria; she’s been strung up, per the artwork, and now it’s Rivers’s turn. And par for the course we flash back to explain how we got to this moment. 

We learn of Sheriff Sally Wilcox, smokin’ hot 23 year-old leader of an all-female posse, how she got the posse together and the various crooks they brought to bear. But when we come back to the opening with Rivers we learn that Sheriff Sally, for all her bravado, isn’t that smart. For Rivers, as his “last request,” asks for a roll in the hay with Sally…and she complies! After the undescribed hay-rollin’, Rivers as expected takes Sally hostage and threatens to kill her, or else. But Sheriff Sally is willing to die for justice, as Rivers will soon learn. A fun story, but definitely could’ve been fleshed out more. But then, Man’s Life stories in general are too quick and underdeveloped. 

“Bloodiest Mass Murderer Of The Old West” is by Grayson Peters and from the October 1962 issue of A-OK For Men; this one returns to the pseudo-nonfictional vibe of “Madams Of The Old West.” This one’s about real-life personality Charles Stanton, who per the editorial intro was a businessman who was plagued with stories of being a sadistic murderer. It sounds like this isn’t known for sure – I’d never heard of the guy before, personally – but the story obviously doesn’t leave it a mystery. It opens with Stanton and gang brutally killing a family, Stanton wiping out the dad and teen sons and then personally seeing to the raping of the preteen girls. We go on to learn of his “gore-spattered career,” from killing prospectors to more raping. This one’s very much in the realm of the sweats, almost coldly documenting the various transgressions with no real verve to the narrative. The finale is memorable enough, with Stanton getting his balls shot off by a Mexican bandit he’s upset! 

“Saga Of Buckskin Frank Leslie: Slick-Shooting Dude From Tombstone” is by Jack Pearl and from the February 1964 issue of Man’s World. Pearl is another author I’m surprised I’ve yet to get around to reviewing; I actually have the two sleaze paperbacks of his the editors mention in their typically-insightful intro. Frank Leslie is another real-life Old West personality, one who made a name for himself – now forgotten by most – in the infamous town of Tombstone. We have appearances from lots of those personalities, like Wyatt Earp, but for the most part this fast-moving story focuses on Leslie, a guy from the mountains who still wears his buckskin proudly and who quickly makes a name for himself in town. This I believe is the longest story in the collection, and comes off more like a character piece, documenting his time in Tombstone. 

“Shoot-Out At Mad Sadie’s Place” is by Donald Honig and from the June 1967 For Men Only. This one has a great editorial intro: when compiling the stories for the book, the editors discovered that Honig was still alive, and also that he was happy to discuss his men’s mag work. He claims that High Plains Drifter was more than likely inspired by this particular tale. That was in fact one of the few Westerns I watched as a kid in the ‘80s during my brief Westerns interest, so I can see what Honig meant, as both this story and that film concern a gunslinger enterting a town hellbent on revenge. But wasn’t it implied that Eastwood’s character was a ghost? Or am I confusing High Plains Drifter with Pale Rider

This is a very entertaining yarn, one that certainly could’ve benefitted from more fleshing out. Indeed, the finale is so rushed as to be humorous. Pod Luken, a gunslinger who often has found himself on the wrong side of the law, has a brother who acts as sheriff in a small town, and the brother’s going to help Pod start a new life on the right side of the law in California. But then Pod gets a letter that his brother is dead – shot down by six gunmen from Texas. Pod heads in to town and scopes the place out; there’s a great part where he decides he doesn’t like anyone in it, given that none of them stood up to help his brother. To prove his point Pod goes around to various places and challenges the owners – ie, “What would you do if I didn’t pay for this beer?” and etc, to which of course the owners reply they’d grab their gun and demand he pay. Yet none of them were willing to do the same to help Pod’s brother. 

Pod sets his sights on the six Texans, taking out one of them in a whorehouse – a great part where Pod gets his own girl, goes upstairs with her, and starts snooping around for the room the Texan is in. But this will be the most elaborately-depicted revenge in the story. For as mentioned it’s way too short for its own good. Evidence of this is the female character, Molly; she’s the one who wrote Pod the letter, and as it turns out she was engaged to Pod’s brother. She’s a pretty young blonde, but the expected fireworks between her and Pod don’t ensue…likely because Honig didn’t have the space. Instead, she shows Pod who the Texans are, and Pod starts thinking over his careful revenge…and then it’s all rushed through as he gets in a running gunfight with them, one that climaxes in the titular bar owned by Mad Sadie. A great, fast-moving story, but one tarnished by an apparent restriction on the word count. 

“The West’s Wildest Hell Raiser” is by Jules Archer and from the January 1957 issue of Stag. The frontispiece for this one is unusual in that it’s a naked dude who is exploited: an otherwise-stunning depiction of the titular hell raiser, riding naked into town. Another novelty is that this incident doesn’t open the story, par for the men’s mag template, but is instead relayed in an off-hand line midway through the yarn. The opening is actually a brutal knife-fight the hell-raiser, Clay Allison, gets in with another guy for the rights to a watering hole in Texas. Clay wins the fight, but is left with a permanent limp. This one’s similar to the Frank Leslie story, documenting the various tussles this hotheaded guy gets into, but I found it pretty tame – even stuff like a blonde and a brunette getting in “a hair-pulling match” over Clay isn’t exploited nearly as much as it should’ve been. 

After this we get some wonderfully-reproduced covers, and I found it interesting that the Western-themed men’s mags usually had men on the cover, whereas of course most men’s mags covers were known for their cleavage-baring women. That said, the editors do include a risque photo shoot in the issue, with an early 1960s lady posing in various states of undress; as I say, they do a wonderful job of recreating an actual vintage men’s mag, only with much higher production values. 

Again, a big thanks to Bob, Bill, and Paul for Mens Adventure Quarterly #1. I really enjoyed it…and I have a feeling I’m going to enjoy the second issue, which focuses on ‘60s spy stories, even more!